In New Orleans this week, a Trimble Insight panel featuring FreightWaves’ Craig Fuller, Bloomberg Intelligence’s Lee Klaskow and MIT’s Angela Acocella painted a freight market still stuck in neutral. Panelists said the bigger surprise of 2025 has been demand’s failure to firm, while the driver population continues to slide — a combination that has extended the downturn far longer than many expected. They also warned that the year’s tariff whiplash distorted ordering patterns and muddied forecasts for shippers and carriers alike.
Speakers described how shifting tariff signals triggered bouts of front‑loading and inventory builds that later ran headlong into tepid end demand — leaving fewer replenishment moves for trucks in the fall. That stop‑start dynamic was a central theme of the conversation, with Klaskow calling the policy backdrop “chaos” and Acocella highlighting the bullwhip effect in order behavior.
Fresh data out this week back up the “volume problem.” The American Trucking Associations reported that seasonally adjusted for‑hire tonnage fell 2.1% in October to the lowest level since January, and declined 1.8% year over year — confirmation that contract freight remains under pressure heading into peak season.
The spot market isn’t bailing out fleets either. DAT said October truckload demand slipped again, with its Truckload Volume Index down month over month and year over year across vans, reefers and flatbeds, and it characterized this year’s holiday shipping surge as “virtually non‑existent.” Weekly figures echo that picture: load posts on DAT One fell 5% during the week of Nov. 8–14 while truck posts eased 1%; average broker‑to‑carrier spot rates landed around $2.04/mile for dry van, $2.45 for reefer and $2.38 for flatbed.
Costs are moving the wrong way at the same time. The national average on‑highway diesel price rose to $3.868 per gallon for the week of Nov. 17, up three cents from the prior week and roughly 38 cents higher than a year ago. That keeps pressure on fuel‑surcharge math and squeezes margins for carriers still fighting for loads.
Capacity continues to grind lower beneath the surface. While panelists at Trimble flagged a sliding driver population, DAT noted that tighter supply is starting to tug spot rates upward even as volumes sag — and shippers in its benchmark consortium are prioritizing reliable capacity over small price wins, a sign that survivability concerns are creeping into procurement.
Meanwhile, the LTL side is still reshaping after last year’s seismic exit. A Delaware bankruptcy judge this week approved Yellow Corp.’s liquidation plan, clearing the way to distribute an estimated $650–$700 million to creditors and closing a long chapter of capacity reallocation across LTL networks. While mostly an LTL story, the ruling underscores how the broader trucking landscape is still digesting structural change.
For fleets and brokers, the Trimble gathering also spotlighted tools meant to grind out productivity gains while the market resets. Trimble introduced a next‑gen, cloud‑native TMS and a set of AI agents — for order intake, roadside breakdowns and invoice scanning — aimed at shaving manual work and tightening handoffs across shippers, carriers and brokers. The company said beta access for the end‑to‑end TMS is planned for early 2026, with several agents entering pre‑release evaluation now.
Bottom line: The recovery clock won’t start until freight volumes do. The latest readings — softer tonnage, a muted spot market and rising diesel — align with the Trimble panel’s message that demand, not just capacity attrition, is holding the cycle back. Until orders and replenishment improve, carriers will need to protect cash, lean on fuel discipline and automation, and be ready to pivot quickly if tariff clarity or a late‑season restock finally stirs freight off the sidelines.
Sources: FreightWaves via Yahoo Finance, American Trucking Associations, DAT Freight & Analytics, U.S. Energy Information Administration, Trimble
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