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FMCSA's Fix Is Broken

The Caviar Desk · June 8, 2026 · 5 min read

Happy Monday. The FMCSA launched a new carrier registry three weeks ago to stop freight fraud — zero new carriers have been registered since then. We break it down in today's feature story.

Plus:

PepsiCo Is Running 41 Driverless Trucks
Peak Season, Shrinking Driver Pool
Cameras Know Where Your Drivers Have Been

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Question of the Day:

Truckload spot rates in June are running roughly __% higher than this time last year.

🍳 What's Cookin' In Freight

🚛 PepsiCo Is Running 41 Driverless Trucks Right Now. PepsiCo is operating 35 driverless box trucks on Arizona roads alone, making it the first major U.S. consumer goods company to disclose large-scale autonomous truck use on public roads, with another five in Texas and one in Arkansas. These are no longer test environments. The trucks hit 99% on-time arrival performance and have logged zero accidents on public roads since going driverless in June 2025. The middle mile is being automated in real time, on public highways, hauling Doritos to Walmart. PepsiCo has been direct about the endgame: grow the business without adding as many drivers.

📉 Peak Season, Shrinking Driver Pool. Trucking employment sits at 1,464,800 jobs in May, down 60,600 from this time last year and essentially flat for three straight months despite a brief April bump. Uber Freight principal economist Mazen Danaf says that even with recent monthly upticks, trucking employment levels remain critically low compared to any point in the past decade. The market is tightening well beyond what typical peak-season pressure alone would account for. Uber Freight's Q2 outlook says "Spot rates are likely to run 25% or higher compared to 2025 levels."

📷 Cameras Know Where Your Carriers Have Been. Roadside camera networks like GenLogs now capture nearly 20 million truck images daily across 1,000+ locations, logging USDOT numbers, VINs, plates, and cab numbers on every pass. When an Arizona driver was pulled into a scale house recently, an officer reconstructed his entire route from Louisiana to Arizona using camera sightings alone. They found timestamps that didn't match his paper logs. Carriers now have much more difficulty falsifying paper logs or manipulating ELD devices.

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FMCSA's New Carrier Registry Launched. Three Weeks In, Zero New Carriers Registered.

For decades, all it took to become a federally registered carrier was an email, a name, and a PO Box.

Criminal rings ran that gap for years: same truck, new MC number, fresh authority the moment the old one got burned.

FMCSA estimates several thousand suspicious registrations were tied to fraudulent carriers under the old system, so on May 19, they launched Motus. A new registration system requiring biometrics, facial recognition, and actual business verification before you get an MC number. Motus now also cross-checks EIN names against IRS records, something the old system never did.

The problem is that Motus wasn't just a new tool layered on top of the old one. It was a full replacement. Every carrier, insurer, BOC-3 filer, and surety bond provider in the country had to migrate into it.

Three weeks later, Carrier411 pulled FMCSA's own census data, and here's what it showed:

1,235 total records in the entire system
16 updates processed
0 new carriers registered
1,219 records completely unchanged
Authority, insurance, and safety feeds are still stale and unreliable
Active carriers showing up as ghosts in broker vetting systems

New owner-operators report waiting 18 days to activate their authority and being unable to move trucks while payments come due. Large fleets with compliance departments are largely unaffected. Single-truck operators and carriers making authority changes are bearing the brunt.

FMCSA called resolving the issues "an absolute priority." Administrator Derek Barrs, in a separate memo, called them "minor technical issues" while praising the rollout as "a major agency milestone."

P. Sean Garney, co-director at Scopelitis Transportation Consulting, told FreightWaves: "I don't have a good sense that they're getting any closer to fixing this."

Ben Van Zee, who built motusbugs.com to publicly track failures, estimates bugs will litter the system for months.

Timothy Dooner called it "the most underreported story in freight."

Until the FMCSA confirms that Motus data feeds are stable, add a manual check for any carrier you haven't worked with before, especially small carriers and new authorities.

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🌎 Around the Freight Web

🚢 Asia-to-US Container Rates Up 109% Since Iran War. Container shipping rates have spiked by 109% since the Iran conflict began, as fuel costs, Asian port congestion, and early peak-season demand have all risen at once.

🚨 CBP Is Coming for Your Customs Broker. A new executive order mandates maximum penalties for customs brokers who fail due diligence on imports, with no mitigation for repeat offenders.

📈 Truckload Rates Up 40%. NTG's weekly report shows truckload spot rates are running 40% above last year, while the GDP grew just 0.5% in Q4.

💎 Luxury Cargo Is Getting Targeted. Criminals used a spoofed broker text message to redirect a $187,000 shipment of designer goods in New Jersey. Overhaul flagged the unexpected stop, called police, and traced the cargo to where it had already been unloaded.

🤠 Texas CDL Tests Are Now English-Only. As of June, all CDL knowledge exams are English-only, no translators are permitted, and any driver who fails a proficiency check at a weigh station gets placed out of service on the spot.

📞 Mystery Woman on the Phone Isn't Liable. A Texas appeals court ruled that a remote caller can't be held liable for a fatal crash caused by the distracted driver on the other end of the line.

😳 The Passenger Who Just Wanted to Get Home. A non-CDL rider took the wheel of a semi on I-80 while the actual driver slept, crashed it into a ditch, and that's when troopers discovered the actual driver's CDL had already been suspended.