Why pick a fight with the air? And: downtime for the spot market 3 o'clock hustle

Overdrive Radio

This edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast comes as the Mid-America Trucking Show continues in Louisville, Ky. In this edition, a couple of my conversations with two owner-ops with some commonality between them in a willingness to be the contrarian in this loud age, on a variety of things. That’d be Lexington, Kentucky-based owner-op Chad Boblett, running with one truck and using brokers. Likewise the operator you'll hear at the podcast's top, Henry Albert, who moves truck parts between Laredo and points in the Southeast when he’s hauling and not working with dealer reps or other operators to train them on new technology as part of Freightliner’s longstanding Team Run Smart initiative. Albert’s been demonstrating lately in his own operation the effect of speed increases on fuel mileage, an attempt to investigate the benefits of time saved versus the sacrifices made in increased fuel costs. In the podcas, he describes the 70-75 mph speeds he’s been pushing along his lanes, and the benefits accrued in, for him, added time off, by eliminating a 10-hour break on a roundtrip. Also: Chad Boblett on the 3 o'clock hustle, the waiting game one can play to take full advantage of all available negotiating leverage, and the ELD mandate's damper on its usefulness, given broker and carrier adjustments to concerns with time efficiency.