HANNOVER, Germany — Clarios is taking Battery Manager, its monthly-fee battery-monitoring service for commercial fleets, to Europe. The company announced the expansion Sept. 14, timed to the IAA Transportation show in Hanover, Germany.
The service was running on about 1,100 connected vehicles across last-mile, long-haul and day cab operations in early September, Cagatay Topcu, vice president of Connected Services at Clarios, said during a Sept. 8 media briefing. The company is working with 20 fleets and expects to pass 2,000 vehicles in October, he said.
Clarios introduced the service as Battery Manager Pro in March at the Technology & Maintenance Council’s 2026 exhibition in Nashville, Tenn. At the time, it expected to sign its first customer that month, FreightWaves reported. Junior Barrett, global director of business development, said Clarios will reach about 2,000 paying installs by the end of September.
Some fleets overspend on batteries, Topcu said, running eight on a truck or replacing them every year. Others end up with trucks stranded by a dead battery. Clarios estimates the service saves a typical fleet about $500 per truck per year.
What the sensor tracks
The hardware is an aftermarket sensor on the battery’s negative post, a wire harness and a Clarios gateway that sends the data to the cloud. Heavy-duty trucks generally don’t have a battery sensor, Barrett said, and Clarios’ analytics run on the data that sensor collects.
The sensor works with AGM and SLI batteries from any manufacturer, including ones Clarios doesn’t make, and with trucks from any OEM, Barrett said. Topcu said it covers 12-, 24- and 48-volt systems, including the low-voltage side of battery-electric vehicles.
Christina Yarnold, director of product management for Connected Services, said the service reports on three things: a battery nearing end of life, a state of charge low enough to risk a no-start, and a failing starter or alternator.
“It’s not about the data. It’s about insights and actions. Nobody needs another dashboard,” Yarnold said.
Low-charge alerts can go by email or text to whoever is on duty. Because each sensor is paired to a single battery, a technician replaces only the one that’s failing.
Pricing and payback
Pricing varies with fleet size, complexity and engagement and runs as high as $15 per vehicle per month for smaller fleets, Barrett said. At that rate, a truck costs $180 a year to monitor against Clarios’ $500 savings estimate.
Asked about a hypothetical 50,000-truck fleet, Barrett put the savings at $25 million a year. That figure counts only hard costs such as jump starts and tow trucks.
“Soft cost isn’t in that math: driver sitting waiting, customer experience,” he said.
In Europe, Barrett said, the draw is downtime and driver hours. A battery failure that hits when a driver is out of hours takes that driver off the road.
Self-install and telematics integration
Clarios first assumed Battery Manager would need professional installation and hired a third-party installer. Fleets told the company their own technicians could handle it. Barrett said technicians now finish in 15 to 20 minutes after their first unit, and one union shop did its first in under 10. Setup runs through Clarios’ ConnectHub mobile app.
For now, each truck carries a Clarios gateway. Barrett called that a short-term strategy. Longer term, Clarios plans to pull sensor data through the gateways telematics service providers already have on trucks. Barrett said Clarios reaches small fleets through those providers and sells directly to large ones.
“In the very near future you’ll hear another announcement about an actual TSP integration,” Barrett said. “We need to be seamless, not another login.”
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(Editor’s note: C.H. Robinson has released a lengthy statement in response to the lawsuit. Its entirety is published in different parts of this article.)
The latest legal battleground for brokers is a federal lawsuit in Texas that accuses two of the biggest 3PLs of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
The suit, filed Wednesday in the federal district court for the eastern district of Texas, accuses C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) and TQL of having “engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity predicated on forced labor and wire fraud from which (they) knowingly (or with reckless disregard) derive a substantial financial benefit.”
“Defendants operate, control, and influence enterprises alongside Illegal Carriers to funnel customer freight through non-compliant carriers for Defendants’ financial gain,” the lawsuit adds.
The lawsuit was brought by six carriers: Stevens Trucking, Western Flyer Express, D&M Carriers d/b/a Freymiller Trucking, IWX Motor Freight, Christenson Transportation Inc and E.O.S. Inc.
The suit brings up a separate question: how many of these suits are brokers going to face? The reality is that while the ruling on broker liability in Montgomery vs. Caribe Transport II holds the potential for legal damage to the brokerage community, the suit filed by the carriers against C.H. Robinson and TQL has nothing to do with Montgomery legally, and could have been filed even if that case went the other way at the Supreme Court.
C.H. Robinson responded with a lengthy statement.
“We reject the allegations in this civil lawsuit, its false characterization of C.H. Robinson and our business practices, and its fundamental inaccuracies about how the freight market actually works,” the company said in its opening paragraph.
Super Ego is a player in the suit
But one of the key players in the lawsuit not named as a defendant is Super Ego Trucking. The lawsuit refers several times to Illegal Carriers, with the capitalization put there by the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Super Ego is mentioned as an example of “one of the Illegal Carrier networks at issue here.”
The lawsuit notes that C.H. Robinson had dubbed Super Ego one of its “carriers of the year,” specifically for carriers with more than 1,000 trucks. That designation was handed down approximately a year ago.
There are other allegations in the suit about the choice of carriers by the 3PLs, which also was a target of C.H. Robinson’s statement.
“All the carriers we work with are authorized by the federal government, plus meet additional safety standards and higher levels of insurance than legally required,” the statement said.
Since then, Super Ego has been the subject of a highly critical report on 60 Minutes, and is the defendant in a lawsuit over its practices.
Some aspects of the lawsuit get right to an issue that brokers, especially C.H. Robinson, have been particularly concerned about: being classified as a carrier.
The decision in Montgomery vs. Caribe Transport II did open the door to brokers being able to be held negligent or liable on the same basis as carriers.
But the Stevens et. al. vs. C.H. Robinson/TQL lawsuit goes in a different direction
Broker said to be a carrier
“Despite operating as a motor carrier as defined by (federal code)–including use of their own trailers, dispatch of drivers, and assumption of care, custody and control of freight–TQL and C.H. Robinson rely on their purposes status as a ‘broker’ (lawsuit’s quote marks) to knowingly avoid registering as motor carriers with the Department of Transportation, which in turn allows them to evade regulatory obligations requiring the reporting of safety violations and crashes involving the Illegal Carriers they use to haul loads for their customers,” the lawsuit says.
C.H. Robinson already is fighting an action in a Texas court that involves not only a more than $600 million verdict in a case involving a fatal wreck, but also raises the question over whether a broker can be found to be a carrier. The jury in that case did make that finding against C.H. Robinson.
The lawsuit spells out specific lost business by the carrier plaintiffs in what could be seen as an attempt to establish standing in the courts.
For example, it says that EOS, Western Flyer, IWX and Chestenson “have been priced out” of the business moving freight to and from Graphic Packaging International’s mill in Texarkana, Texas because of “the conduct alleged in this complaint.”
The “Illegal Carriers” are also accused of engaging in behavior that has come to be known as acting as “chameleon carriers.”
“A ‘chameleon carrier’ is a fraudulent trucking company that operates by shutting down a previous entity with a poor safety record and then reopening the same operation under a new name and DOT number to obtain a clean slate with the Department of Transportation,” the lawsuit says.
Former employees check in
The lawsuit has a series of quotes that it says are from former employees of Super Ego, though their names are not revealed. Many of them are quoted as saying they “hauled loads for C.H. Robinson.”
But they also dealt with Super Ego. The comments by one of the anonymous drivers sums up the thrust of the 60 Minutes report.
“They all switch DOT numbers to evade enforcement,” the unidentified driver is quoted as saying. “And they all use addresses in multiple states to disguise the fact that they are all controlled from the same Chicago-area network. The only variation is the name on the door.”
Other charges against Super Ego mentioned in the lawsuit–even though it is not a defendant– include that drivers were regularly pushed to violate Hours of Service rules, and entreaties to join as part of a lease purchase plan that could see a driver end up with a truck at the end of it were mostly fraudulent.
An email sent to TQL’s press relations email also had not been responded to in time for publication.
In a prepared statement issued to FreightWaves, Trey Duck, a partner in the Austin law firm of Nix Patterson that is one of the firms involved in the suit, said “TQL and CH Robinson have lined their corporate pockets by cutting corners and selling the safety of American roads to the lowest bidder.”
“Although they are supposed to be gatekeepers ensuring carriers are safe and compliant, these defendants have solicited and enabled foreign-run carriers to put unqualified truck drivers on our roads, knowingly profited from forced labor and peonage, and pushed hard-working American trucking companies out of business,” according to Duck’s statement. “We are very much looking forward to getting into the discovery process and proving our claims in court.”
While the tendency of companies is to greet media inquiries like this with a “no comment,” the C.H. Robinson statement went after the charges in the lawsuit aggressively. FreightWaves has chosen to run it in its entirety along with statements posted earlier in this article.
“This lawsuit is wrong about some of the most basic elements of the industry. No freight broker sets rates. The marketplace does. ” That statement is in response to allegations about the role the plaintiffs say is carried out by the brokers in the markete.
“When demand for carriers is high and supply is low, carriers command higher rates,” the statement said. When demand is low and the supply of carriers is high, shippers command lower rates. This is reflected in the rate forecasts we publish monthly and, as a publicly traded company, we report our margins quarterly.”
“It’s also a myth that freight brokers merely find the lowest-priced carrier. The choice of a carrier for any shipment rides on a multitude of factors. Our process takes into account carrier proximity, size, equipment, certifications, and customer requirements ranging from sustainability to service levels. We look forward to defending ourselves vigorously and pursuing counterclaims supported by real facts and the law.”
More articles by John Kingston
Some judicial skepticism of non-domiciled rule in Lujan arguments
Another aspect of Montgomery: it might make human brokers more valuable
At shippers’ confab, defining a ‘fragile’ trucking market
The post New lawsuit approach: accusing C.H. Robinson, TQL of RICO violations appeared first on FreightWaves.
This article is contributed content from an independent writer. It does not represent the views or opinions of FreightWaves or any of its subsidiaries.
A trucking company hauling an Amazon Prime trailer had lost its operating authority, returned to service and accumulated safety violations before a crash injured three people on a New Mexico interstate, according to a lawsuit challenging Amazon’s carrier selection and oversight practices. New Mexico State Police cited the truck’s driver for careless driving after the collision.
The amended complaint filed against Amazon in July, alleges Amazon allowed Road Warriors Logistic to transport freight before the carrier met Amazon’s own requirement for 180 days of active operating authority. The plaintiffs contend the warning signs continued after the carrier began hauling Amazon loads, including safety violations and another crash less than a month before the collision at issue. Their central carrier selection allegation is that Amazon failed to follow the standard it had set for itself.
The collision occurred on Oct. 25, 2024, in New Mexico. According to the complaint, Harmanpreet Singh was driving a Road Warriors tractor pulling an Amazon trailer when he lost control, crossed the median and entered opposing traffic. The truck struck another commercial truck before jackknifing across both eastbound lanes, colliding with the plaintiffs’ vehicles and causing serious injuries. The New Mexico State Police report says Singh was cited for careless driving. The investigating officer wrote that the truck crossed the median “for unknown reasons.”
At the center of the carrier selection allegations is Road Warriors’ operating history. According to the complaint, the company received operating authority in May 2021, but that authority was involuntarily revoked in May 2022. The plaintiffs allege Road Warriors had its authority reinstated May 8, 2024. By July, they say, the carrier was hauling Amazon Relay freight despite having only about two months of reinstated authority. The plaintiffs cite Amazon’s public 2023 Relay requirements specifying a minimum of 180 days of active authority.
For Cassandra Gaines, a transportation attorney and expert witness specializing in broker liability and carrier selection, the allegations show what can happen when a company’s carrier decisions depart from its written requirements. “A written policy gives employees a rule to follow and gives a jury a rule to measure them against,” Gaines said. “If a carrier does not meet that rule, the question becomes who allowed the load to move and why.”
Authority history makes that question particularly important. “It helps brokers and shippers assess a carrier’s operating experience and the safety record available for review,” Gaines said. “Limited or interrupted authority may leave less recent history to evaluate, and an interruption calls for a closer look at why it occurred. That is why many companies make a minimum period of active consistent authority a firm eligibility requirement.”
The complaint also describes safety concerns that allegedly developed before the October collision. It identifies hours of service violations in July and August 2024, six vehicle maintenance violations on Sept. 13, and a Sept. 30 crash while the carrier was operating for Amazon Relay. The timeline also lists an unsafe driving violation and three maintenance violations on Sept. 30.
Another unsafe driving violation allegedly occurred Oct. 7, just 18 days before the crash involving the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs argue that the available information should have prompted Amazon to investigate the carrier’s safety fitness before continuing to entrust it with freight and equipment.
Amazon’s Relay technology is another focus of the lawsuit. The plaintiffs allege Amazon exercised extensive control over transportation through load assignments, delivery appointments, routing expectations, performance monitoring and the ability to restrict access to future freight. They also allege Amazon personnel intervened when shipments were delayed, communicating with drivers and dispatchers, changing schedules and arranging replacement equipment or drivers.
Those allegations underpin the plaintiffs’ effort to hold Amazon responsible for the conduct of Road Warriors and Singh. The allegations have not been established by the complaint itself. Defense responses were not included in the materials reviewed for this article.
Gaines developed the CAVRA Carrier Vetting Industry Standard to help companies build practical carrier selection and monitoring policies. Her advice to brokers and shippers is to examine whether their procedures work under everyday operational pressure. “Write rules your business can actually follow, train the people assigning freight and make the escalation decision before the load moves,” Gaines said. “If you repeatedly depart from your own written standard, the policy becomes evidence of what your company knew it should have done.”
Cassandra Gaines is a transportation attorney, founder and CEO of Carrier Assure and an expert witness in matters involving broker and shipper liability, carrier selection, trucking safety, and transportation risk management. She has published widely recognized carrier vetting frameworks and has spent more than a decade advising transportation companies on carrier qualification, broker liability and transportation risk. Gaines was previously recognized by Business Insider as one of its “100 People Transforming Business in North America.”
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This article is contributed content from an independent writer. It does not represent the views or opinions of FreightWaves or any of its subsidiaries.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said he has already told his team to consider a ban on diesel exports. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said officials are studying whether a full or partial ban would work without wrecking U.S. refining. Trump said a decision would come “fast, one way or the other.”
The pressure is easy to see from a truck cab. The national average for on-highway diesel hit about $6.53 a gallon this week, a new high. That is roughly $3 more than a year ago. In some states, the pain is worse. California has been well above $8. Farm groups and trucking-heavy states say the cost is crushing harvest work, grocery distribution, and long-haul freight. Republican lawmakers from Iowa, Alaska, Tennessee, and other states have called for a pause on exports. One House bill would shut off diesel exports through early 2027. Another would trigger a ban whenever the national average hits $5 a gallon.
The idea is simple. The United States makes more diesel than it burns at home. Refiners have been sending large volumes abroad, often more than a million barrels a day, and at times closer to 1.6 million. Supporters say keeping that fuel here would rebuild inventories and knock down pump prices for truckers and farmers. Critics, including oil companies and some of Trump’s own energy officials, say the opposite could happen. If refiners lose their export market, they may cut overall runs. That could mean less gasoline as well as less diesel. Allies in Europe and Latin America that now buy U.S. diesel would also lose supply. Any ban would be the first major limit on U.S. energy exports since Congress ended the old crude-oil export ban in 2015.
That last point matters. Congress no longer gives the president a routine switch to cap petroleum-product exports. If the White House acts on its own, it would almost certainly use emergency law.
What IEEPA is and how it became a tariff machine
The main statute is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. Congress passed it in 1977. It lets a president act after declaring a national emergency over an “unusual and extraordinary threat” that comes, in whole or in large part, from outside the United States. Once that emergency is declared, the president can regulate or block many cross-border deals. That includes the import or export of property subject to U.S. jurisdiction. For decades, presidents used IEEPA for sanctions, asset freezes, and export controls. They did not use it to tax imports.
That changed in 2025. Early in his second term, Trump invoked IEEPA to put tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, citing fentanyl and border threats. He later used the same law for broad “reciprocal” tariffs tied to a declared emergency over the U.S. trade deficit. No president had used IEEPA that way before. The administration argued that the power to “regulate” importation included the power to put a price on it. Importers and business groups sued. They said tariffs are taxes, and only Congress can tax.
What the Supreme Court did
On Feb. 20, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed with the challengers. In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Court ruled 6-3 that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the Constitution gives Congress the power to lay duties. IEEPA never mentions tariffs or taxes. The words “regulate … importation,” he wrote, cannot carry the weight of an open-ended tariff power. Until 2025, no president had read the law that way. Customs stopped collecting the IEEPA tariffs almost immediately. Other tariff tools, such as Section 232 national-security duties, were left in place.
The ruling was narrow in an important way. The Court blocked IEEPA as a tax statute. It did not erase IEEPA’s older use: blocking or limiting trade itself. Legal analyses since the decision have stressed that point. The statute still lets a president prohibit exports if the emergency test is met. That is the opening a diesel ban would try to walk through.
How IEEPA would be used to ban diesel exports.
A presidential diesel embargo would not look like a new tax. It would look like a prohibition. The White House would rely on a declared national emergency, either the energy emergency Trump issued in January 2025 or a new one tied to wars that have squeezed global refining, including the conflict with Iran and attacks on Russian plants. An executive order would then tell the Treasury Department and other agencies to stop, license, or sharply limit diesel exports. Companies that shipped anyway could face IEEPA penalties. The ban could be total or partial. It could last weeks or months. Trump and Bessent have already floated both options.
That path is legally cleaner than the tariff experiment, but it is not risk-free. IEEPA still requires a foreign-source threat and measures aimed at that threat. Refiners would have every reason to sue. They would argue a price-relief plan for U.S. truckers is a domestic political fix, not a response to a foreign emergency. Courts might also ask why a ban on American fuel leaving the country deals with wars overseas. Even if the order survives, the market effects would hit freight first. A short-term glut on the Gulf Coast could cut diesel prices in some regions. The East Coast, which already depends on products moving from the Gulf, could see a messier picture. If refiners cut runs, gasoline and diesel could both tighten later.
For freight operators, the legal question is less abstract than it sounds. If Washington can flip an emergency switch on diesel trade, fuel policy becomes another source of rate volatility: fast, political, and hard to plan around. The next signal will not be a floor speech. It will be an executive order citing IEEPA.
Matthew Leffler is a trucking industry expert and an adjunct professor of law at Michigan State University College of Law. He can be reached at matthew@armchairattorney.com.
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Tesla formally inaugurated its dedicated Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada on September 24, a 1.7 million square foot plant built adjacent to Gigafactory Nevada, and while the company framed the day as the start of high volume production, the first truck actually came off that line back in April, which makes this less a factory opening than a coming-out party for a program that has been promising this moment since 2017.
Deliveries went to DHL, PepsiCo and US Foods to name a few. The plant is designed for 50,000 trucks a year. Tesla has not said what it is currently producing, and that distinction matters.
I drove one. Fully loaded, tractor and trailer, and I came away impressed by three things in particular: the power, the acceleration, and the ride quality. The acceleration is the part that will get written about because it is the part that surprises people. The ride quality is the part that would matter to me if I were putting a driver in it every day.
There is also a detail from behind the wheel worth naming. You barely touch the service brake. Regenerative braking handles so much of the deceleration that the driving rhythm changes, and anyone who has run mountain grades understands immediately what that implies for brake wear and for the cost line that goes with it.
Nine Years, Told Honestly
Dan Priestley, who leads the Semi program, walked me through a timeline that started earlier than most people realize.
The idea surfaced in 2014, and the origin was a contradiction inside Tesla’s own operation. The company was building a battery and powertrain plant in Nevada and shipping parts down to Fremont, California on diesel trucks. Electric car components moving on diesel power did not sit right with the mission.
Design work went from modeling to hardware in early 2016. Two alpha trucks appeared publicly in 2017, and Priestley said those vehicles drove more miles than any alpha program Tesla has run. The design language from those trucks survived, particularly the center seating position and the dual screen cockpit.
The pilot fleet came in 2022. Just under 200 trucks, and roughly 17.5 million miles accumulated across them. Priestley described the architectural change between the alphas and that fleet as a massive leap, and then described the current production truck as the product of taking fleet data and direct customer feedback and feeding it back into the design.
What I appreciated was his framing of why. He said plainly that Tesla is not a heavy truck company yet, expressed respect for the people who run trucks every day, and said the truck has to work for the majority of fleets and drivers rather than for one customer.
The clearest evidence that the feedback loop is real is a window. The original truck had a small pop-out window. Customers pushed back hard, and Tesla put in a roll-down window. The reason turned out to be mundane and completely obvious in hindsight: badge readers, toll booths and call boxes all sit at roughly that height. Priestley and the team owned it as a design call they got wrong.
The Best Part Is No Part
The factory tour is where the engineering argument actually lives, and the phrase the team repeated is that the best part is no part.
The battery moved from purchased 2170 cells to in-house 4680s built in the complex next door. That change let Tesla cut battery mass and total kilowatt hours while holding range, because efficiency improvements elsewhere absorbed the difference.
The efficiency number is the one I would put in front of a skeptical fleet manager. The original internal target was roughly 2,000 watt-hours per mile, and the team said outside voices called it impossible. They are now running around 1.6 to 1.7, which is about 25 percent better than the target they were told they could not hit.
The drivetrain was reworked. The previous rotor used a carbon fiber sleeve borrowed from the Plaid powertrain, which performed well but was not the right technology for mass production. The new steel cage rotor is cheaper, produces more torque, and is more reliable. A bar-round stator shared with Cybertruck took roughly 80 kilograms out of the drive axle and let Tesla reuse an existing production line.
Then the subtractions, which is where a maintenance manager should pay attention.
The truck originally ran three separate oils, one for the motor, one for the gearbox, one for the hub. The hub is now fully integrated with no oil at all, which also lowers rolling resistance. The motor and gearbox share a single common oil rated to last more than a quarter million miles.
Hydraulic power steering is gone, replaced by a fully redundant electric steer-by-wire system developed for Cybertruck. Priestley made the operational case directly: a hydraulic steering leak is rarely catastrophic, but it puts the truck out of service until a technician gets to it. Removing the loop removes the failure mode and removes it from the pre-trip inspection. The side benefit is a turning radius Tesla claims is close to a Model Y, which showed up in dock maneuvering.
The thermal system is the same indirect design used on Cybercab, with the same compressor and coolant pumps used across tens of millions of Tesla vehicles. There are no refrigerant lines running forward, so there are no AC lines to damage or service.
Range, Charging and the Shift Math
Two variants are coming out of Sparks, a 325 mile standard range and a 500 mile long range. Tesla says the 500 miles is real world at 82,000 pounds fully loaded rather than a diminishing load figure. Standard range curb weight is under 20,000 pounds with a 45,000 pound payload capability.
Priestley was candid about why the range is not higher. Tesla could build a truck that crosses the country on one charge, and it would carry very little, because more battery means more mass and more cost. His argument is that range only means something paired with charging.
The shift arithmetic he described goes like this. Start at 450, run 400 miles, arrive at 10 percent, take 60 percent back in 30 minutes during the break the driver was going to take anyway, and run another 300. That is roughly 700 miles in a shift without stopping solely to charge.
On infrastructure, Tesla is using the Megawatt Charging System and says it is designed for full interoperability in both directions, meaning the Semi can charge on other providers’ equipment and other manufacturers’ MCS trucks can use Tesla’s network. By the end of the year Tesla expects more than 30 stations and over 200 megawatt-capable posts, with deployments at Pilot Flying J. The charging hardware is available for purchase.
There is no sleeper, and Priestley was straightforward that a sleeper depends on an over the road charging network that does not exist yet. The chassis is set up to accept one. The sequence is regional first, then connecting regions, then over the road.
He also declined to discuss price. Outside estimates have circulated around $290,000, which would sit below published estimates for a Freightliner eCascadia or a Volvo VNR Electric, but Tesla has not confirmed a number publicly.
Uptime Is the Argument That Will Land
The pilot fleet is running at 98 percent uptime, and Priestley did not pretend the road there was clean. He described teething problems on drivetrain components and issues with routing, airlines and hoses.
The service model borrows from the car business. A dedicated Semi service network, mobile technicians dispatched to the truck, over the air diagnostics and updates, and shared parts distribution with the automotive fleet. That last point is the underrated one. There are far more Tesla cars on the road than Class 8 trucks, and the same distribution centers and the same high voltage technician training pipeline serve both. Field failures found on the car side propagate to the truck side.
The team said they were appalled at the vehicle off road numbers they saw across the industry, and built to beat them. The line I wrote down was that planned maintenance is fine and unscheduled maintenance is a tragedy.
The Market This Enters
Now the honest context, because the factory is an enormous bet on a market that has not yet arrived.
Battery-electric vehicles account for less than one percent of new Class 6 through 8 truck sales in North America. ACT Research does not expect widespread long haul Class 8 adoption until somewhere between 2035 and 2040. Volvo Trucks executives have publicly said they expect electric truck sales to stay modest through 2026 and into 2027. Federal incentives and emissions rules that supported early deployments are receding, which pushes the decision back onto total cost of ownership.
Against that, ACT forecasts roughly 224,800 Class 8 retail sales in the United States in 2026. A plant sized for 50,000 units is sized for more than a fifth of the entire market.
The competitive picture is further along than the headlines suggest. Volvo has over 750 VNR Electrics running, more than 30 million zero-tailpipe miles, and 84 certified EV dealerships across 33 states and four Canadian provinces. Freightliner has eCascadias with more than 55 fleets and over six million miles. Tesla’s 17.5 million miles came from fewer than 200 trucks, which is a far higher per-truck utilization, but Volvo’s dealer network is a real asset Tesla is building from scratch.
Why It Matters
The strongest case for this truck is not the acceleration that everyone will write about, it is the systematic removal of failure points, the hydraulic steering loop, two of three oils, the refrigerant lines, because those are the items that put a truck out of service on a Tuesday and cost a fleet money it never planned for. Whether that engineering discipline can overcome a charging network that barely exists outside a few corridors is the question the next three years will answer, and it will be answered by fleets running real freight rather than by anyone standing in a factory.
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Temperature-control systems provider Copeland expanded its presence in the cold chain with the acquisition of Dickson. The deal adds monitoring and compliance technologies serving the healthcare and life sciences industries to its portfolio.
“The acquisition of Dickson further strengthens our ability to serve customers across every stage of the healthcare and life sciences cold chain, from pharmaceutical manufacturing through distribution and patient care,” said Copeland CEO Ross Shuster.
Financial terms of the transaction were not provided.
Dickson’s cloud-based platform provides temperature monitoring and visibility throughout the healthcare supply chain, from manufacturing to final delivery. The system notifies food and pharmaceutical shippers of potential losses before they happen.
“Our customers operate in highly regulated environments where precision, compliance and visibility are essential,” said Rick Weiler, president and CEO at Dickson. “By joining Copeland, we are bringing together complementary technologies and expertise that support the monitoring and protection of temperature-sensitive products across increasingly complex supply chains.”
Copeland has over 200 million heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration installations across approximately 40 countries.
Why it matters? Copeland’s acquisition of Dickson will allow it to integrate advanced cloud-based temperature monitoring into the supply chains of its healthcare customers. This combination protects sensitive products and mitigates product loss by notifying shippers of potential temperature excursions before they occur.
More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:
- Old Dominion pulls forward 4.9% GRI as LTL carriers accelerate rate hikes
- Truckload carriers: Capacity exodus growing, not slowing
- J.B. Hunt flags Q3 cost pressures, shares sink 12%
The post Copeland expands cold chain capabilities with Dickson acquisition appeared first on FreightWaves.
