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HAPPY FRIDAY

Van spot rates just beat contract rates for the first time since February 2022, and carriers are already positioning as if they know high rates are here to stay.

Plus:

• $11K Buys a Trucking Company

• Another Nuclear Verdict: $104M for a Fatigue Policy

• California's $160M CDL Gamble Gets a Deadline

💡QUESTION OF THE DAY:

Today's Newsletter is Brought to You by Highway

🍳 WHAT’S COOKIN’ IN FREIGHT

🚛 $11K Buys a Trucking Company. A real trucking company, with trucks, drivers, and contracts included, sells for a median of $1.15 million on mainstream business marketplaces. On Facebook, Telegram, and a dedicated grey-market site, the bare FMCSA authority alone goes for about $11,500 to $20,000, per AlphaLabs research analyzing 3,774 listings scraped from around 9,950 Facebook posts and about 79,600 Telegram messages. Price tracks trust, not trucks: authorities pre-approved by a major freight program sell for roughly double the price of a plain one. And the "private sellers" flooding these channels are mostly a handful of dealer accounts — on Telegram, 384 of 385 listings with a traceable email led back to just four addresses.

🚨 Another Nuclear Verdict: $104M for a Fatigue Policy. An El Paso jury awarded $104 million against Mesilla Valley Transportation after driver-trainer Juan Garcia fell asleep on I-40 in Oklahoma, drifting into a parked box truck and killing co-driver Orlando Robles, who was sleeping in the berth. Under cross-examination, MVT's national chief safety officer testified: "You don't need sleep to rest" — the company's policy never required drivers to sleep before driving. The jury awarded Robles' son $20 million in compensatory damages and $7.5 million in punitive damages; the rest went to his wife, mother, and daughters. MVT (a 1,600-truck, 5,000-trailer carrier) hadn't commented as of Thursday. With broker preemption gone since the Montgomery ruling, a safety-policy admission like this is now a broker's exposure too, not just the carrier's.

⚖️ California's $160M CDL Gamble Gets a Deadline. California and the FMCSA have filed final briefs in a D.C. Circuit case over roughly $160 million in highway funding that FMCSA is set to withhold starting Oct. 1 unless the case is resolved first, with oral arguments now set for Sept. 11. FMCSA says California kept about 20,000 non-domiciled CDLs valid past drivers' legal-presence expiration dates and never met a Jan. 5 corrective deadline; California counters that no federal law requires CDL expiration to match presence documents, and that its own state rules already comply. A separate Alameda County court has already ordered the DMV to allow those 20,000 drivers to reapply for their canceled licenses. New York faces a parallel $73.5 million threat, so the ruling could set a precedent beyond California.

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Spot Beats Contract

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Dry van spot rates beat the contract rates in June for the first time since February 2022. DAT put the all-in spot van rate at $3.00 a mile against a $2.89 contract rate.

The same reversal showed up across all equipment. Spot reefer hit $3.39, pulling 17 cents ahead of the contract's $3.22, up from a 7-cent gap in May. Spot flatbed reached $3.69, an all-time high, closing the contract's remaining edge to 11 cents from 52 a year ago.

Contract rates didn't chase any of it: van contract slipped 3 cents to $2.89, and reefer contract fell 6 cents to $3.22, as lower fuel surcharges offset gains in linehaul. Only the flatbed contract rose, up 3 cents to $3.80.

When we take fuel out of the equation, year over year, the moves are the largest in years: van linehaul rates hit $2.37 a mile, up 45%; reefer reached $2.70, up 39%; and flatbed climbed to $2.94, up 40%, the biggest jumps since June 2021 for van and July 2021 for reefer and flatbed.

The Usual Suspects Are Clear

The rate crossover wasn't a volume story. DAT's van index rose 11% from May but sat flat against last June; reefer ran 8% below last year, flatbed 4% below. "If demand were driving this, volumes would be climbing too, and they're not," said DAT analyst Dean Croke.

It wasn't a fuel story either. The national average diesel price fell 9 cents this week to $4.578 a gallon, still 84 cents higher than a year ago, but moving in the wrong direction to explain why the spot rates are going up.

NTG Freight points to the actual driver pool: thinning carrier capacity and a frozen new-authority pipeline that aren't reversing anytime soon.

The Gap Closes From the Top

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FreightWaves founder Craig Fuller put the current spot-contract linehaul spread at 27 cents in carriers' favor as of July 9, a spread that historically runs 35 to 50 cents the other way.

"Contract rates could go up as much as 50 cents a mile. That's at least what the SONAR data is suggesting over the next year," Fuller said. Tender rejections are still running above 16.5%, he added, a sign of just how tight capacity has gotten.

High Rates Are Here to Stay

Carriers and Wall Street are already positioning for high rates to hold. J.B. Hunt's stock is up 82.73% year over year. Class 8 truck orders hit 30,500 units in June, up 241% year over year, as fleets raced to lock the last 2026 build slots.

The Logistics Managers' Index hit 71.1 in June, its highest reading since March 2022. For brokers, the number that matters is the one signed last winter.

A van lane locked near $2.89 is now being covered at $3.00, and Fuller's own forecast points to $2.89 moving up to meet it, not the other way around.

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 🌎 AROUND THE FREIGHT WEB

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⚠️ 10 More ELDs Down, Three Are Repeat Offenders. FMCSA revoked 10 more ELDs Thursday, and three are rebrands of devices already pulled once: same company, IDs one digit apart.

🚢 Container Rates Near $9,000. Container rates just hit $9,000 per forty-foot container on the East Coast, but freight index provider Freightos says the early start to peak season could mean import volumes are already starting to slow down.

🔄 A Truck Safety Rule Gets a Second Try. FMCSA and NHTSA are reviving automatic emergency braking rules for heavy trucks after quietly shelving the first attempt.

📈 STG Walks Out of Bankruptcy. The nation's fourth-largest intermodal marketing company emerged from Chapter 11 after wiping out $1 billion in debt, with Fortress and Invesco taking majority ownership.

📦 Amazon's New Move on FedEx and UPS. Amazon Shipping is quietly cutting surcharges to win over shippers who'd normally default to its two biggest rivals, now that the service is open to any business, not just Amazon sellers.

🎣 FREIGHT CAVIAR CORNER

Freight Gong Friday is FreightCaviar's weekly live show, hosted (almost) every Friday from 8–10 AM CST by Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski and Reed Loustalot.

Each week, we bring on operators, analysts, and executives from across the industry for unfiltered conversations about what is actually happening in freight.

This Freight Gong Friday, we are joined by Clayton Griffin, President at OTR Solutions, Jake Mathis, Founder & CEO at Southern Reins Logistics LLC, and Sergiu Raducan, Founder at Kovin Group, as our special guests.

Tune in here. Presented by Epay Manager.

📷 FREIGHT CAVIAR PODCAST

Founder & CEO at NT Logistics, Lynn Gravley, joined Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski on the FreightCaviar podcast to discuss the real reasons why some freight fraud incidents go unreported, his new role as Chairman of the TIA Board of Directors, and why he compares AI's potential impact to the advent of computers.

We also talk with Lynn about his approach to building broker relationships and how those connections help solve real challenges across trucking networks.

Watch it on YouTube, or listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

😂 FREIGHT HUMOR