ELD Whack-a-Mole

Happy Hump Day. Canada has 42 ELD providers. We have 1,020. Today's feature explains why. 

Plus:

• Spot Rates Slide for a Fourth Straight Week

• FMCSA Asked to Pull TQL's License

• Fifth Circuit Revives Penske Broker Liability Case

💡 QUESTION OF THE DAY:

The FMCSA's most recent batch of five revoked ELDs was tied to ______ total devices sharing the same software.

🍳 WHAT’S COOKIN’ IN FREIGHT

📉 Spot Rates Slide for a Fourth Straight Week. Dry van spot rates fell to $2.95 a mile last week, the fourth straight weekly decline, as load posts dropped 6% and truck posts fell 4%, according to DAT. Reefer rates ticked up 2 cents to $3.38 while flatbed held steady at $3.60, but DAT's Dean Croke says the national dry van rate is down 22 cents since the week of July 5. Croke says a surge of West Coast imports rushing ahead of tariff changes is pulling peak season forward, meaning a volume "air pocket" could hit as early as the fourth quarter.

⚖️ FMCSA Asked to Pull TQL's License. The Small Business in Transportation Coalition has asked FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs to suspend or revoke the broker license of Total Quality Logistics, the group's second such request since an original complaint filed in September 2025. SBTC says a copy of TQL's 2022 license application shows the company certified compliance with federal broker regulations, including the rate-transparency rule at 49 CFR 371.3, a certification SBTC alleges TQL has since violated through contractual waivers. TQL hasn't responded publicly to the new request. A related case, Pink Cheetah Express v. TQL, is set for oral argument before the DC Circuit in September.

🚨 Fifth Circuit Revives Penske Broker Liability Case. A federal appeals court reinstated liability claims against Penske Logistics and its brokerage arm, Penske Transportation Management (PTM), in a fatal 2018 Texas crash, ruling that a carrier doesn't shed responsibility just because a load gets re-brokered further down the chain. The load passed through four parties before the crash: Penske Logistics accepted it, handed it to PTM, which brokered it to Liberty Lane, which brokered it again to OK Trans, whose driver caused the fatal crash. "When a carrier takes on a load, as it moves down the chain, it still has responsibility," attorney Mark Blubaw of Benesh said.

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One ELD Vendor Breaks Ranks

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has removed 95 electronic logging devices (ELDs) from its registry since January 2025, and it publicly announces each batch.

Hundreds of ELD brands run on the same handful of base technologies, a practice called white-labeling. It's why Overdrive routinely asks vendors named in FMCSA's revocation batches one question: do you market other ELDs?

Until now, no vendor named in an FMCSA batch had ever admitted their device might actually enable illegal hours-of-service manipulation. However, one just did.

A Side Hustle Gone Wrong

This vendor's business wasn't really ELDs. "Our office basically offers dispatch services and safety services," plus IFTA reporting, they said.

The ELD was an add-on, software bought from another company and registered with FMCSA "to make money," under an agreement that forbade naming the original developer.

After reading Overdrive's own coverage of ELD white-labeling and cheating, the vendor began checking their own customer list.

"We started vetting [the carrier customers of the ELD]... and saw suspicious activity and then started canceling subscriptions left and right," they said.

They self-revoked the device from the FMCSA's registry, only to be surprised to find themselves named in the agency's press release anyway.

"We started getting a lot of calls... asking about illegal services," they said, comparing the market to drug dealing: "There's a demand for drugs," the vendor said. "That's why there are suppliers."

Grading Your Own Papers

FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs has made ending ELD self-certification a personal mission.

The system works, in Mark Hazelwood's description on FreightWaves, like this: "In self-certification, it's like grading your own papers. Guess what? You're self-certified. You're now an ELD provider."

Hazelwood chairs the ELD provider Assured Telematics and would gain if the US adopted Canada's model, so the framing isn't neutral, but the gap he's describing checks out: the US has 1,020 self-certified ELD providers, while Canada, which has required third-party certification since 2019, has 42.

Catching Up, Slowly

NMFTA Chief Operating Officer Joe Ohr, who's been tracking the white-labeling problem, told Overdrive that the most recent batch of five revocations "represented 171 ELDs just in that group."

Roadside inspectors are also starting to catch up. Oregon and Arizona lead the country in ELD-tampering out-of-service violations under the new violation code that took effect in April, and Alabama and California have both climbed the rankings in the last two months.

In Arizona alone, a separate Overdrive count found 281 ELD-tampering violations from just 115 driver inspections.

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 🌎 AROUND THE FREIGHT WEB

🚚 NYC Wants Amazon's Contract Drivers as Employees. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is backing a bill that would require Amazon and FedEx to directly employ delivery workers, who are currently treated as contractors. It already has majority support on the City Council and could pass by fall.

🎖️ FMCSA Names Its New Chief Safety Officer. Steve Dowling spent the last several years as Covenant Logistics' senior director of enterprise safety, helping the fleet post three straight years of record crash-rate reductions, before FMCSA tapped him for the role.

😉 Emoji Can Get You 9 Years in Prison. A California CBP officer used a secret emoji code to text cartel traffickers his lane assignments, collecting $10,000 a vehicle as roughly 1,052 pounds of drugs crossed through his checkpoint. He was sentenced to nine years for it.

🧀 When Your Collateral Can Melt. An Italian bank has held Parmigiano Reggiano cheese wheels as collateral for loans since 1953. Now a record heat wave has it burning through 30% more power on cooling to keep €300 million worth of that collateral from spoiling.

⛽ Diesel Finally Takes a Breather. The national average dropped 9.5 cents to $5.257 a gallon this week, the first relief after climbing for several weeks straight. The drop comes as oil markets swing amid Iran-related tensions, with even a hint of a deal enough to send prices lurching higher.

💪 Werner Isn't Sweating July's Slowdown. CEO Derek Leathers told investors this week that federal crackdowns are still pulling capacity out of the market and that this year's peak season will bring higher rates than last year's.

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🎣 THE FREIGHT CAVIAR CORNER

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😂 FREIGHT HUMOR

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