From regulatory hurdles to early operational successes, it was a busy, eventful year in the trucking, transportation, and freight industries. While you might be looking forward to putting 2024 in your side-view mirror (or mirrorless system?), we wanted to spend the first full work day of 2025 recognizing the most significant articles and topics the FleetOwner team covered over the past 52 weeks.
Below are links to some of the most popular stand-alone articles, features, and topics on FleetOwner.com that continued to catch our editors' attention and yours throughout the year: from infrastructure and supply chain challenges from a major bridge collapse and emerging technologies to early OEM and fleet successes, and new trucks, new brands, old presidents new again, and that pesky prebuy—here are the topics and tales that defined 2024:
10. Key bridge collapse creates fleet challenges
Local carriers faced an existential threat after Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed. Swift collaboration between government and industry helped fleets adjust their operations to the sudden loss of a vital river crossing.
“There was such a great response from the Coast Guard and the various agencies involved in clearing the channel and getting the port reopened,” Louis Campion, president and CEO of the Maryland Motor Truck Association, told FleetOwner. “It was something that went much, much faster than I think anyone anticipated at the time of the bridge strike.”
Swift cleanup efforts, regulatory waivers, and grant funding helped local carriers maintain their operations. However, troubles remain for these carriers today. Severe congestion still disrupts travel times, and labor disputes threaten to shut down the port again. Read more…
9. Autonomous offerings grow as more testing finds early success
Autonomous long-haul trucking solutions are growing. With all the significant trucking technology providers improving their offerings through tests and actual driverless freight movement in 2024.
Volvo Autonomous Solutions announced a new deal with DHL Supply Chain in late 2024 that it would begin moving the LTL carrier’s freight within Texas before the year’s end. The transport-as-a-service offering that DHL started is one way OEMs and technology providers plan to market their AV offerings as 2025 approaches.
Along with Volvo Autonomous Solutions, AV technology provider Aurora is working with Paccar’s Kenworth and Peterbilt brands to offer a factory-installed solution in their long-haul tractors.
Rival Torc Robotics, an independent Daimler Truck subsidiary, has plans to offer driverless technology in the Freightliner Cascadia beginning in 2027. Torc’s autonomous truck technology is meeting advanced validation trials using the new generation of Freightliner Cascadias on multi-lane closed courses, the AV company announced in October. The self-driving company is talking with fleets about implementing its technology into the supply chain this decade.
Meanwhile, Kodiak Robotics—already using its AV technology without humans on Class 8 trucks operating on private roads in Texas and New Mexico—has taken an equipment-agnostic approach, allowing the Kodiak Driver autonomous system to be upfitted to modern equipment.
Autonomous vehicles have their obstacles: regulations and system validation. Yet, autonomous trucking developers have displayed use cases where AVs can shine bright in the trucking industry. These AV developers have also proven AV trucking technology over hundreds of thousands of miles and counting. Read more…
8. Passion and technology help fleet grow to new heights
With a stack of more than 10,000 driver applications, Reliable Carriers must be doing something right. While the auto hauling company gets a lot of attention from its YouTube channel hauling luxury and one-of-one vehicles to private owners, Reliable Carriers’ breadth of vehicle hauling is vast. From transporting vehicles to auto shows to transporting clay models for OEMs to being the exclusive transporter for auto auction houses, saying the company has made a name for itself in the auto-hauling industry is a bit of an understatement.
But a success story of this magnitude takes time to write. Read more…
7. After Amazon success, Rivian extends its reach into the commercial EV space
Rivian is going further into the commercial vehicle space, stripping the van body from its Rivian CV product and marrying its chassis to the Morgan Olson C250. The partnership will lead to developing an electric version of the C250 step-van announced in March 2023, explicitly designed for Canada Post. The companies announced at 2024 Work Truck Week in Indianapolis.
While the C250e is the partnership’s current focus, Joe Thompson, Morgan Olson’s COO, told FleetOwner the Rivian platform could be used with other bodies “down the road.” This is because leaders in the JBPCO group see Rivian as the electrified answer to light-duty commercial vehicle space needs. Read more…
6. Meet the most successful Class 8 EV OEM yet
Almost 20 years ago, Kurt Neutgens failed to build an electric sports car company out of his garage. On Friday, the governor of Kansas was here to congratulate him and Orange EV co-founder Wayne Mathisen on opening a 440,000-sq.-ft. factory in her state so they can build thousands more electric yard trucks to help fleets cut emissions and improve depot operations.
No company in the U.S. has built more electric Class 8 trucks than Orange EV, which sold its first terminal tractor to DHL Supply Chain in 2015. The OEM delivered its 1,000th tractor to Lazer Logistics last in late 2023. Neutgens hopes to eventually double that output annually here in Kansas City, Kansas, where his company opened a new factory in early 2024. Read more…
5. Freight recession finally recedes
The weak freight market that plagued 2024 also created opportunities along the supply chain. Private fleets expanded for-hire services, helping those transportation operations thrive, while for-hire fleets lost freight market share. It wasn’t until the fall that data started to show the freight recession—that followed the COVID-19 pandemic freight boom—was ending.
However, questions remain going into 2025, such as whether we’ll see a return to more typical U.S. freight hauling patterns or if the past five years have created something new. To wrap up the year, we spoke with Ken Vieth of ACT Research to get his take on the rocky year and what’s ahead. Watch video…
4. Big truck remodels and rebrands
Like their fleet customers, truck OEMs continued to focus on creating more efficient equipment for today’s operations. While they are still building toward a potential zero-emission freight future, all the significantly heavy-duty truck makers still primarily make diesel-powered equipment. Two OEMs in 2024 rolled out new versions of popular Class 8 tractors.
Volvo Trucks North America set its sights on trucking’s next decade when it unveiled its all-new VNL in January. OEM leaders said it will be the base platform for current and future transportation technologies—from diesel to renewable fuels. The newly designed VNL was designed for fuel efficiency, safety, driver productivity, connected services, and uptime. VTNA opened order books in April for the new VNL, which will be produced at the Volvo Trucks New River Valley Plant in Dublin, Virginia, with the first hundreds of the trucks arriving at dealer locations in the fall.
See also: History of the major trucking OEMs
This fall, Daimler Truck North America’s Freightliner used the American Trucking Associations’ management conference to show off the fifth generation of its Freightliner Cascadia, the most popular Class 8 vehicle on North American roads. Dating back to its debut in 2007, Freightliner has built and sold more than one million Cascadias.
Another significant OEM change in 2024 was the end of Navistar and the start of International Motors. The legacy OEM producer of International Trucks returned to its roots. The company rebranded from Navistar Inc. to International Motors with a refreshed logo and customer solutions focus on October 1. OEM leaders said this rebranding is part of a shift in company strategy to expand beyond truck and powertrain engineering and production. International is shifting its business strategies to focus on transportation solutions and streamlining fleet customer and driver experiences. Read more…
3. Emissions regulations
In the past decade, sustainability in the trucking industry looked like freight efficiency, said Jacqueline Gelb, VP of energy and environmental affairs at the American Trucking Associations. But trucking regulations in this decade have begun to focus on propulsion systems, such as alternative fuels and battery electric vehicles. These regulations have introduced new challenges in an already struggling trucking economy and have caused confusion and frustration in the industry.
The transportation sector is the largest source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, contributing 28.5% of total GHG emissions according to the U.S. EPA’s 2023 inventory of GHG emissions. In terms of transportation, heavy-duty vehicles contribute 23.1% of the sector’s emissions.
Heavy-duty vehicle emission regulations fall on two central authorities: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board. These authorities have shaped the heavy-duty vehicle market for over 50 years and continue to do so with new rulemaking. Read more…
2. What will Trump’s return to White House mean for trucking?
Signs point to a smoother path for carriers in 2025. The freight recession is finally ending, and U.S. voters decided to send Donald Trump back to the White House with a Republican-controlled Congress that is expected to be friendly to trucking. Here’s what another Trump presidency could mean for trucking.
After the election, we laid out three ways a GOP-controlled Washington, D.C., could change the trucking industry, which includes weakening environmental regulations, lowering taxes, and reducing operational regulations. We also looked at the constant turnover atop the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, dating back to Trump’s first term, and the people he hopes to see run federal agencies that impact trucking, including Sean Duffy for the Department of Transportation and Lee Zeldin for the Environmental Protection Agency. Read more…
1. 2027 prebuy activity begins
While there is hope that a switch in presidential administrations could curtail the impending emissions regulations poised to make trucks more expensive, for most of 2024, we were all eyeing the potential EPA ’27 prebuy. Truck manufacturers, dealers, and suppliers spent 2024 gearing up for the 2027 prebuy, pushing fleets to do the same, as new regulations will significantly impact fleet operations.
In May, before the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Las Vegas, we spoke with OEMs about strategies for fleets thinking ahead. By the summer, prebuy activity was underway for fleets looking to get ahead of 2027’s more stringent emissions regulations, according to ACT Research. The next few years could be challenging for the industry, with latent capacity and underutilized equipment affecting demand.
Heavy-duty truck leasing and rental markets also anticipate growing demand as truck equipment availability recovers from pandemic-driven supply chain problems. Industry experts told FleetOwner they anticipate a good market for rental and leasing operations in 2024 and going into 2025.
As the year winds down, many fleets still face an unanswered question: To prebuy or not. Anticipated price hikes on new trucks could cripple many small fleets. Now might be a better time to buy, but interest rates and freight rates are not conducive to profitability. What’s a fleet to do? Read more…
Along with these articles, FleetOwner publishes several popular annual features that garner attention throughout the trucking and transportation industries. These include our annual looks at the largest commercial transportation systems in the U.S., the FleetOwner 500: For-Hire and FleetOwner 500: Private Fleets.
Our annual profiles of women in the industry, Women in Transportation 2024, were published this summer. Each year, FleetOwner recognizes the transportation operations of private fleets with the FleetOwner Private Fleet of the Year award. This fall, we expanded and rebranded our annual New Models to the 2025 FleetOwner vehicle guide, our largest-ever look at the next generation of heavy-duty, medium-duty, light-duty, and alternative-powered trucks and vans.
We put a bow on the year with the 2024 Trucking by the Numbers feature, an info-graphical look at the facts and figures that make up the trucking and transportation industries. To view what's ahead for FleetOwner in the new year, please check out our 2025 Media Kit.
