Overdrive Radio

Overdrive

The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio

  1. Building momentum: Trucker of the Month Sam Kelly at 3 trucks and counting

    4H AGO

    Building momentum: Trucker of the Month Sam Kelly at 3 trucks and counting

    With this week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, hear our talk with Black Sheep Express three-truck owner-operator and "problem-solver" Sam Kelly, headquartered in Mississippi and Overdrive's April Trucker of the Month, putting him in the running as a semi-finalist for our Trucker of the Year award for 2026: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15823428 If you or your small fleet, up to three trucks, excelled through the rough years since the big fuel run-up and rates shock of 2022, if you’ve persevered through all of that turmoil, and this year’s with war in Iran, you’re no doubt a worthy contender. Get your business in the running at https://OvedriveOnline.com/toptrucker Here’s wishing everyone in the audience a Memorial Day honoring the fallen for the freedoms we enjoy here in the United States. For this week’s podcast, a different sort of honor for Kelly, leased now to CST Lines of Wisconsin in a refrigerated freight operation. Kelly and his two drivers, Bubba Rushing and Rodriguez Byrd, pull a dedicated load outbound from Wisconsin to California, and in the self-dispatch program at CST there Kelly otherwise negotiates and books brokered freight on his own. Often, they're completing a triangle on the return with the Southeast and/or Washington State as the midpoint, depending on the season. Kelly separates himself from the crowd in myriad ways, and perhaps not least in his willingness to be that problem-solver, to take matters into his own hands when plans break down. But Kelly’s story is remarkable in other ways, too, particularly with respect to a clear instinct to learn from his own errors in business and in life, adjust accordingly, and come out the other side no less eager to excel through hard times. His drive toward business ownership in his early days trucking was such that he took a 40-some-cents-a-mile company driver job and basically lived in the truck to turn it all into a nest egg for a cash payment for his first power unit. It was a bit of a disaster, that truck, by his account, yet he persisted. When it came time to buy a house, too, he kept his long-term growth goals in focus. Frugality, in essence, would be his wachword As in personal finance, as in business, too, for the owner-operator, who’s learned other lesson from those hard times, as you'll hear in this week's podcast. Enter the Trucker of the Year competition: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker As mentioned, Overdrive Load Profit Analyzer: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer

    29 min
  2. 85% of gross, no insurance chargeback for leased owner-ops: Promise kept, with ELD data transparency

    MAY 18

    85% of gross, no insurance chargeback for leased owner-ops: Promise kept, with ELD data transparency

    Owner-operator and Overdrive 2025 Small Fleet Champ Wes Oberman's mostly-open-deck Oberman Logistics business makes good on growth goals with a transparent promise to owner-operators leasing there: 15% of the gross for costs, no insurance chargebacks. Since his big win last fall in the 3-10-trucks division, the owner-operator's moved to 13 trucks, including his own 2026 Kenworth T680, by virtue of keeping that promise. At insurance renewal early this year, even with growth, he was able to reduce his overall insurance outlay in an age where liability costs for motor carriers of all stripes just continue to roll up and up and up. How he's done it: Acting on lessons learned from his National Association of Small Trucking Companies insurance agent about engagement with data the operation generate. We wrote about his experience in brief last Fall before the renewal -- https://overdriveonline.com/15770374 -- and in this week's edition of the podcast he details the result: "We had companies fighting over our business this year. It was a nice turn," Oberman said. His big win as Small Fleet Champ contributed, in ways small and much larger, where it matters. "I have added that we are the Small Fleet Champs at the bottom of my email signature," he said, thus routinely flagging the recognition in any communication with a potential insurer. More importantly, the award was a "talking point when talking to all these insurance companies" in renewal negotiations. But he knows it's the real engagement with safety data that he and his leased owners show, in addition to proven safety performance OTR, that's likely most moving the needle. Details in the episode on an ELD provider switch that's helped, the tradeoff between "monitoring" and demonstrating active engagement, which means effectively more insurer comfort with his fleet's risk. That means itself lower costs, preservation of the transparency in his 15% pricing for owners leased long-term. "That's my main pitch to owner-operators," that "our deductions are so low" for a reason, he said. Enter your own business to compete in the 2026 Small Fleet Championship: https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc

    26 min
  3. FMCSA's 'front door problem' and new Motus registration: What's happening May 14, and how to prepare

    MAY 11

    FMCSA's 'front door problem' and new Motus registration: What's happening May 14, and how to prepare

    Bit of a public service announcement for the bulk of this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio. FMCSA Office of Registration director Ken Riddle emphasizes just what owners with motor carrier authority need to do by May 14 this week to prep for the agency’s long-awaited new registration system, called Motus. Maybe you'd also been wondering just what was so important about the May 14 deadline in the agency's most recent notification to the industry about it. On May 14, Riddle noted, at roughly 8 p.m. Eastern time, FMCSA’s current registration system will go dark. Motor carriers and other registered entities need to do three things by that time to ensure that getting set up to manage the company’s profile in Motus is, with any luck, a smooth one this coming week. **Log into your FMCSA Portal account to confirm it is active. If your account is disabled or archived, reach out to the FMCSA Contact Center to have the account unlocked. **In the Portal, ensure your company information, operation classification, contact information, and individuals authorized to access your record are all correct, with special emphasis on ensuring hte correct primary company official who will need to claim the account in the new Motus system. **Make any updates to your company information in the FMCSA Portal the same way you complete a Biennial Update. Select “Biennial Update (MCS-150)” in the “Registration” tab. Details from the most recent notice: https://overdriveonline.com/15823610 Next week Motus will launch likely Tuesday the 19th, and every entity that uses it for MCS-150 updates and all manner of other changes, as noted, will need to claim their Motus profile. Personal ID verfiication will be part of it, and though the old system will come back online, registration functionality will be gone. Find more details about the rollout in the podcast, likewise the extent to which this transition itself will function to weed out a lot of the junk of inactive, long-dormant entities from the system, and how it could hold big import for combating all the impersonation that’s gone on with hackers taking over legitimate carriers’ authorities as well as "chameleon" entities using multiple DOTs to evade enforcement. Folks all around trucking and among state enforcement officials join the the highest federal enforcement officer in the land, current FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs, in hopes that Motus will ultimately correct current registration limitations in detection of potential bad actors from the moment they apply for authority and the color of legitimacy it brings. Barrs called issues therein FMCSA’s “front door problem” as part of CBS 60 Minutes' reporting on Super Ego and the shape-shifting entities in its network. FMCSA registration director Ken Riddle speaks to some of the ways Motus will evolve to help combat that, and of course what carriers need to do before the transition kicks off Thursday this week. Good news is this should be a major cleanup effort itself, he said, and he wants legitimate carriers to take the steps to make sure it’s as smooth as possible. For those who don’t, there could be a lot of waiting for help on the other end of the transition. As mentioned in the podcast: **Roadcheck's kicking off May 12 -- resources: https;//overdriveonline.com/15824079 **Enter Overdrive's 2026 Small Fleet Championship: https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc **FMCSA's registration office: https://fmcsa.dot.gov/registration and 800-532-8660. **Ongoing coverage of chameleon fleets with Alex Lockie's most recent report: https://overdriveonline.com/15824551

    25 min
  4. Roadcheck 2026: Toughest states for HOS violations, ELD tampering and securement in focus

    MAY 4

    Roadcheck 2026: Toughest states for HOS violations, ELD tampering and securement in focus

    Just how likely is any given owner-operator to be inspected during the next installment of the Roadcheck inspection event? It's slated for May 12-14 next week, and if the 2025 event provides a roadmap, your chance is about 1 in 5. Just post-Roadcheck last year a few thousand of you weighed in with answer to the question shown in a chart you'll find at https://overdriveonline.com/15824079 21% of poll respondents reported being inspected during the three days of the 2025 event. A lot's been made in some recent years of how routine, really, those three days can feel in certain areas of the country, but the 21%-inspected number is well more than the roughly 15% of owner-operators who reported an inspection of some kind during the fully seven-day late-summer Brake Safety Week ithe prior year in 2024. So maybe it's true: Roadcheck really is more of an all-hands-on-deck sort of inspection event. In this week's Overdrive Radio, sit in on my CCJ colleague and editor Jason Cannon's talk with Travis Baskin, head of regulatory affairs for the Motive company, about the 2026 Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Roadcheck, and ways owner-ops, drivers and small fleet owners might prepare for a focus on false logs. And not just as a result of the kinds of whole-cloth backend electronic logging device manipulation we're seeing new evidence of just today with a report from Overdrive's Alex Lockie about one driver's experience at a carrier CBS News linked to the Super Ego network of so-called "chameleon" fleets: https://overdriveonline.com/15823957 Regular readers will recall false logs was also the focus last year, CVSA’s annual campaign particularly keying in on misuse of personal conveyance, with results that showed hours of service as the single biggest out-of-service violation category. The year overall marked something of a sea change for the false-logs category as inspectors focused on PC misuse and were increasingly aware of ELD manipulation, too. 2026 false-log violation rates are on pace through March to hit the big totals seen in 2025 nationwide. This year, you can expect PC to remain in focus, and CVSA has created a new violation code for backend hours manipulation by a fleet or operator in concert with an ELD provider. So far, our sister data company RigDig’s accounting of violations hasn't caught up to the code coming into play in the data just yet -- it began to be issued April 1 this year with the annual OOS criteria update. Yet today we can show you some new rankings of states by their propensity to focus closely on and catch hours violations: https://overdriveonline.com/15824079 Indiana’s sitting at the very top of that list, issuing just more than 1 in every 4 violations in 2025 for hours infractions. Behind Indiana, all at higher than 20% hours violations, are Kansas, Oregon, South Dakota, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa and Colorado. On the logbook fraud front, too, it’s not just backend manipulation by a fleet or ELD company at issue, Travis Baskin notes. You’ve probably heard the “ghost driver” terminology, an electronic variant on the extra-logbook-under-seat approach to making it look right. Baskin, speaking to Cannon just ahead of CVSA’s annual workshop event early last month, said "this is the type of stuff I know that the CVSA is very well aware of," Baskin said. "I know there's going to be a focus on this type of behavior." Take a listen to the podcast for more, and find Roadcheck resources in the post that houses it at https://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio Primer on PC use: https://overdriveonline.com/15290807

    27 min
  5. 20% boost in fuel economy: Perfect timing for Trucker of the Month's new-truck investment

    APR 27

    20% boost in fuel economy: Perfect timing for Trucker of the Month's new-truck investment

    Year 2025 was a rollercoaster downhill for Overdrive March Trucker of the Month Greg Labosky., headquartered in Connecticut. Coming off gains made during a relatively steady 2024 in the 2017 Freightliner purchased used several years prior, and with a semi-finalist nod in the Trucker of the Year competition, mechanical breakdowns yielded tens of thousands' worth in repairs. Copious downtime, too, of course. As he neared the end of payments on his nonetheless manageable note on the unit, he started afresh for 2026 with a brand-new truck you’ll hear about in this episode of Overdrive Radio for April 27, 2026. Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole told parts of the tale of Labosky’s fortuitous investment last month in this feature: https://overdriveonline.com/15820954 You’ll hear Cole throughout the podcast in conversation with the owner just a couple weeks into the huge fuel spike that followed immediately on the heels of U.S.-Israeli bombardment of Iran. Owner-operator Labosky hauls with authority exclusively in the Amazon Relay system, often moving under short-term contracts that adjust fuel surcharges regularly as well as offer toll reimbursements on expected routes in the system between pickup and delivery. With close scrutiny on the underlying linehaul rate, too, he's able to capitalize on opportunity to pocket extra revenues with fuel efficiency, smart purchasing and alternate routing, as the owner details. Freight in the system's kept him moving, he said when he and Cole spoke, but fuel prices where Labosky buys, away from the big truck stop chains, had already added $1.50/gal. to cross $5 . That was a far sight better than what he was seeing at bigger fuel stops in the region, some advertising north of $7/gal., even. Just why do we call his purchase of a new International LT tractor to replace the ailing Freightliner fortuitous? Labosky’s improved his fuel mileage considerably, by well more than mile per gallon already, not even past break-in. "Using the Moive system, which I use habitually to keep track of my fuel purchases, I've been averaging 7.9-8.8 miles per gallon," he said, between 16% to near 20% better than the Cascadia. Gains couldn't come at a better time. Dive into Cole’s full conversation here with an owner who’s truly on top of his trucking game -- minding Ps and Qs, learning the intricacies of mechanics, of contracting in the Amazon system -- with close attention to all the nitty gritty details of what makes a one-truck business truly hum. It ends with something between pep talk and warning for both himself and other owners, particularly younger owners early in their career and overwhelmed by the day-to-day grind, which he knows all too well. He referenced a conversation with his significant other, who as significant others are prone to do hammers home the need to keep building retirement savings. Labosky, 55, knows he's not getting any younger. Sticking to regular retirement savings as a truck owner-operator is hard for a myriad reasons, not least that "everyone's so used to working and grinding all the time," Labosky said. But "we all have to face the realization that we can't just work continuously. We have to start looking at the long-term end game. ... putting money aside for that." Social Security alone won't "make anyone a good living," he well knows. Start building that retirement nest egg now. Odds are you're going to need it. If you know your costs backwards and forwards like owner-operator Labosky, know that Overdrive’s Load Profit Analyzer tool https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer -- can be quick way to assess a rate offer’s potential profit level, not only per-mile or lump sum but per unit of time, too. Get your own business -- or nominate another owner to compete -- in the Trucker of the Year competition for 2026: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

    31 min
  6. What's your cash set-aside for truck/trailer maintenance? Now's the time to boost it

    APR 20

    What's your cash set-aside for truck/trailer maintenance? Now's the time to boost it

    "I think we're really there, where we've finally got tailwinds instead of headwinds." --ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted, speaking in this edition of Overdrive Radio about market fundamentals owner-operators face in 2026, despite the ongoing fuel shock. In this week's podcast, we’re tracking back through the full audio from our Partners in Business coproducer ATBS’s twice-annual updates charting trends in costs, in revenues and bedrock income for owner-operators: https://overdriveonline.com/15820459 Regular Overdrive readers will know this year’s update reconfigured slightly how the owner-operator tax and business services firm calculates the numbers, and you’ll hear detailed explanation of the changes today from ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted. Note that the Youtube version of this week’s podcast includes a way to walk through the entire presentation with all of Mike Hosted’s detailed slides charting market and owner-operator trend data, and that if you’re listening to our standard audio-only podcast on other platforms, you can download the full slides to follow along via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15820610 Find the Youtube version via our website: https://overdriveonline.com/15822598 For more, too, from our time spent with Hosted at the Mid-America Trucking show late last month, look for a Youtube special report by Overdrive video editor Lawson Rudisill with Hosted story of the truly difficult situation in trucking of the last nearly four years and how, as you’ll also hear in this podcast, rates forecasts for 2026 may well hold true to the positive for all of us this year, for the first time in a very, very long time -- since at least 2021. "Why trucking rates are finally heating up in 2026": https://overdriveonline.com/15822613 There’s certainly a lot of hope amongst owner-operators on that score, even with soaring fuel costs, about which Hosted devotes plenty time in the presentation. There's a lot of positivity coming out of the operational trend data, all based directly on operational trends among ATBS owner-operator clients. But a few red flags pop out as well. Among the biggest: Real maintenance spend for the average owner-operator just keeps going up, and up, and up. As the truck ages, it’s going to happen. Yet it’s a sure bet, as Hosted notes, that if you’re not setting aside enough to cover that cost, disaster awaits. Big mechanical breakdowns and associated costs, including the downtime of course, are the No. 1 failure cause for owner-operated businesses in trucking. How bad has maintenance cost gotten? According to Hosted, in 2025 owner-operators spent upward of $14,000 on maintenance. Well more than a grand a month, $250-plus/week. For the average ATBS client, maintenance costs have topped 15 cents for every single mile run -- with an average client running roughly 94,000 miles in 2025. What are you putting aside for maintenance and/or for building that emergency reserve savings? If you haven’t boosted those set-asides in a while, there's no time like the present. A few resources to help: **Overdrive's Load Profit Analyzer, a calcultor for comparing load offers and gaming out rates scenarios based on your costs: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer **Routine preventive maintenance pays owner-op dividends: https://overdriveonline.com/15736532 **Save money, and stay out of inspectors' crosshairs, with smart maintenance: https://overdriveonline.com/15736720

    1h 2m
  7. Smallest fault-code scanner in the world? Diesel Laptops founder honored in Howes Hall of Fame

    APR 13

    Smallest fault-code scanner in the world? Diesel Laptops founder honored in Howes Hall of Fame

    “Owner-operators want tools, small fleets want tools, to be able to do these things. And it’s not that they’re necessarily trying to save money, usually, but they want to save time.” –Tyler Robertson, founder of Diesel Laptops, on the success of his business providing software/hardware to truckers for self-help in the diagnosis-and-repair process Irmo, South Carolina-headquartered Tyler Robertson, head of the Diesel Laptops diagnostic hardware and software provider has striven for an all-makes focus since its early days, in use by untold numbers of owners as well as maintenance pros around the nation since he founded the company in 2015. In this week's podcast, walk through Robertson’s history and just what Diesel Laptops offers to truckers and shops to analyze fault codes, providing a diagnostic assist, even getting you to potential parts you might need to fix the problem. As Robertson suggests in the quote off the top -- tools to help service shops help you, as it were, with timely repairs. Robertson and Diesel Laptops make what might be the smallest fault-code scanner in the world, pairing via Bluetooth to a smartphone app that fills out information around diagnostic clues when the dash lights up. That Diesel Laptops "Diesel Decoder" has been around for a couple of years, but recent updates allow for new functionality Roberston details in this episode, including the ability to force regens if needed, likewise to one-tap from a fault code all the way to a part number. At the Mid-America Trucking Show last month, Diesel Laptops was lauded as the latest inductees in the Howes Hall of Fame, where the Howes Products company pays tribute to individuals and organizations truly making a difference in the trucking and farming businesses it serves, the wider industries , too. Even before official founding, Robertson was on something of a mission to democratize truck and equipment diagnosis and repair. It started as a side hustle the engineer built himself, selling tools online and elsewhere. As so many boostrapped companies’ stories do, Robertson's starts in the trunk of his car. "I used to go to truck stops and sling tools out of the back of my car," he said. "You've got to go where the customers are." Hear much more about Howes' reasons for honoring Diesel Laptops, and more of Robertson's story, in the episode. More about Diesel Laptops and past Howes Hall of Fame inductees: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15820626 The Howes Hall of Fame official site, where you can browse the virtual gallery of past honorees and suggest a future member yourself: https://howesproducts.com/hof More Overdrive Radio delivered directly to your email inbox: https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe

    18 min
  8. High time carriers vet the brokers: More from opening MATS panel on fraud fight, AI, more

    APR 6

    High time carriers vet the brokers: More from opening MATS panel on fraud fight, AI, more

    "Carriers have been vetted to death. ... For 20 years, carriers have been vetted, vetted, vetted. And brokers have not. There's no entry-level audit, no checking in every year like the carrier has to do. The carrier has a responsibility and an ability to start asking questions." --Dale Prax of Freightvalidate Asking questions, that is, to fully "vet the brokers," noted Prax, freight fraud watcher, FMCSA's onetime "worst critic," and proprietor of FreightValidate , a vetting tool offered to both carriers and brokers and unique in that regard. H spoke to the one-sided nature of vetting that’s gone on for decades now. In this Overdrive Radio edition, track back through the opening panel discussion at the Mid-America Trucking Show where Prax delivered those words. As was the case last year during the opening, the fraud in freight markets was a big part of the discussion. Our own Alex Lockie detailed the fraud focus in a report last week you can find at this link -- https://overdriveonline.com/15821288 -- featuring Prax and his work alongside so many around trucking to light a fire underneath regulators (and truckers and brokers themselves) on combating the bad actors. It wasn’t the only big theme coming out of this year's MATS. Panel moderator Brent Hutto, now working with Truck Parking Club, teed up another topic up at the very start -- the notion of AI, and what quick advancement in various forms could mean for freight relationships for owner-operators and trucking more broadly. Panelists included other voices regular readers will be familiar with, including past Small Fleet Champ Jason Cowan of Silver Creek Transportation on his own growing adoption of automation for parts of his back-office processes. Yet Cowan also underscored the importance of really working personal relationships for any owner-operator looking to grow. "I would go to people and say, 'Hey I want to haul your freight,'" he said of his early efforts to ink shipper contracts. The answer, too often, was a question barked back to him, "Well how many trucks do you have?" In those early days, shippers were looking for fleets larger than his three trucks, yet he never lost an opportunity to offer to be the pressure-release valve for any who would listen. "Hey listen," he might say, "here's my card. When somebody drops the ball, give me a call." Thus was a meager start to long-term business relationships with a myriad customers. Silver Creek's up to around 75 trucks today after a recent acquisition, proof positive the approach at least can work to get you started, if you deliver. More about that acquisition: https://overdriveonline.com/15773179 There's more where that came from, likewise from the other panelists featured in an opening MATS session sponsored by Progressive Insurance and DAT Freight & Analytics: **Lee Klaskow, Senior Analyst, Bloomberg Intelligence **Jamie Hagen, Owner & President, Hell Bent Xpress: https://overdriveonline.com/15819686 **Bill Driegert, Executive Vice President, DAT Carrier Products + Convoy Platform **Sanjay Vyas, General Manager for Commercial Lines Product & Pricing, Progressive **Adam Wingfield, Founder & Managing Director, Innovative Logistics Group Also in the podcast, OOIDA Executive VP on the outlook for the broker transparency rulemaking (still hearing May from the FMCSA) and delay on drafting the next big highway bill in Congress. Partisan arguments over war, over immigration and so much more increase the likelihood Congress might kick the can down the road on the front, Pugh said. But time will tell. More ongoing coverage of news, custom trucks, analysis and more from MATS at this collection: https://overdriveonline.com/tag/mats

    1h 11m
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About

The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio

Information

  • Creator
    Overdrive
  • Years Active
    2013 - 2026
  • Episodes
    500
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    Overdrive Radio

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