A tip of the hat off the top of this week’s Overdrive Radio edition to our social media coordinator Jazzmin Campbell, who shared yet another towing mishap occurring in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. It bears all the hallmarks of a parking-lot trap, the driver reporting a bill for upward of $9,000 in fees after he said he exceeded a time limit at the lot on Sunset Road by about a half hour -- mind you, during the big winter storm that hit the city with record snowfall back at the tail end of January.

Judging by the reporting from the Charlotte TV station that had the story first, it’s unclear where exactly on Sunset Road in North Charlotte the lot in question was, but it’s certainly not the first time we’ve picked up on towing and botting shenanigans in that city and surrounding areas:

WSOC-TV's report: https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/charlotte-trucker-hit-with-9000-bill-after-exceeding-parking-limit-by-30-minutes/7IFIEUXET5GLXFZMQCTK4T7DY4/

Tow companies in nearby Gastonia, N.C., to the west and south of Charlotte may well have originated the region’s parking-lot-trap dynamics, where in past booting was quite common: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14894396

Just last year, the state of North Carolina explicitly banned the booting of commercial vehicles, regular readers will remember, yet private-tow tactics for parking enforcement clearly remain available to towing companies: https://overdriveonline.com/15749716

2025 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist Mark Ledford’s small fleet early this year experienced a similar incident in Charlotte he and his driver were able to work their way out of utilizing the very terms of Charlotte’s towing ordinance: https://www.charlottenc.gov/cmpd/Community-Involvement/Local-Ordinances

If the lot or the tow company in question violates signage and other regs there, that could be a very simple way out of an incident with involvement of the authorities -- if the truck hasn't already been towed, of course.

And listen on for small fleet owner Robbie Turnage’s story of a tow gone bad -- and how he was able to, similarly, turn state law in Pennsylvania to his favor. Turnage’s tale is part of the roundtable conversation we conducted just prior to the 2025 Small Fleet Champ awards presentation at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies annual conference last year. We’re right in the middle of the 2025 entries research and judging round -- with announcements coming soon of the full slate of semi-finalist small fleets, certainly an exemplary, diverse group of owners this year.

For now, dig into this conversation with Turnage and his Turnage & Sons milk-tanker fleet, Scott Denmark and Scott Cruthis of Thomasville Funiture Xpress, Wes Oberman of Oberman Logistics, and the small fleet named for and owned by Clifford Hay.

As mentioned in the podcast:

**Overdrive’s guide to beating back outrageous tow invoices: https://overdriveonline.com/15737212

**Our Small Fleet Champ updates with all of the owners featured in the re-air portion of the podcast from November 2025: https://overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ

This week’s Overdrive Radio features Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole's talk with our July Trucker of the Month. Based just outside Baltimore, owner-operator Jeffrey Crise runs open-deck freight, loading equipment quite often out of the port there and, as Cole wrote in his story late last month, the owner’s smack dab in the middle of a business fresh start: https://overdriveonline.com/15831345

Care to guess how the "Crise" last name is pronounced? He and Overdrive Editor Todd Dills had a bit of a laugh over that this past weekend as he worked to put this episode together.

It's not like "crease," but another familiar word. Jeffrey "Cries," like a baby. Yet owner-operator Crise is nonetheless quick with a little chuckle remembering his first decade-plus-long run at a small fleet. Plenty others got a little bit of a laugh out of his company name and insignia on the doors during that first run at a small fleet. "People loved it," he said of the Hot Shootin's Haulin logo, Yosemite Sam featured prominently, on the sleeper of his units.

The name of the biz nodded to his start with an F450 hotshot more than a decade ago, growing to five units and drivers at its high point before tough conditions drove him to shutter the operation just a couple years ago now.

Today he’s back to hotshot flatbed work, pulling himself mostly with a Ram 3500, but likewise a Pete 579 now with a driver employed and at the wheel. His drive to push toward trucking success responds to improving conditions he felt he could see after just eight months away from the road.

He could have retired, he said, but past failures didn’t sit well with him -- he knew opportunity was knocking when freight markets looked like they were turning in 2025.

And Crise had learned plenty along the way, of course, maintained freight contacts with both familiar brokers and direct customers in the interim, all built on past performance -- bedrock on-time delivery and consistent communication, he stressed.

If you take one thing from owner-operator Jeffrey Crise’s experience, here's hope that particularly the multi-truck current and aspiring owners can really feel the energy behind a top goal of his -- to truly serve the drivers. Serve them better than he did with the prior version of his fleet.

He’s feeling good about prospects for that this year, he said.

There’s stll time to get your own business, or that of another owner you admire, in the running for the Trucker of the Year award 2026. We’ve got three more Trucker of the Month semi-finalists coming through October. Make a nomination, or enter your own 1-to-3-truck business, at https://OverdriveOnline.com/TopTrucker

For this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio we're picking up with longtime trucker-songwriter and performer #TonyJustice after getting the opportunity last week to share news of the Large Cars & Guitars truck show’s big $14K haul for the Susan G. Komen foundation.

That makes $200K-plus given by the show's participating truckers and sponsors to the breast cancer awareness, support, and research advocacy group over Large Cars' brief five-year history: https://overdriveonline.com/15831558

Everybody loves a big novelty check presentation, right? In case you missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y-t6j0YfA8

Tune in for history of the long road toward launching the Large Cars show, consistently bringing upward of 100 trucks participating, thelast two years at the iconic Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee.

Charitable donations aren’t the only reason Justice has been in the news at OverdriveOnline.com in recent weeks, though. He's now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit independent recording artists like himself are bringing against the Suno AI-generated-music platform. The Justice v. Suno case alleges copyright infringement, essentially, in the process of scraping recordings to store and train the company's AI models on.

Approached by attorneys, Tony Justice didn’t immediately come to the decision to get out front in the fight, but he’s clearly dedicated now, watching his trucking-music income from streaming dwindle with the proliferation of AI-generated songs flooding listening platforms.

"We have tech and corporate America coming in and trampling on the little guy," he said. "Anytime I'm in a position to use my voice to fight for the little guy, I feel like I need to do that."

Listen here further to Justice's reasoning, it’s not hard to let your mind wander to something closer to the center of the trucking -- just how good so-called AI is or can or will get at driving the trucks themselves. Companies like Kodiak and Aurora and so many others have trained self-driving models on the roads today, with drivers' help, in hopes to bring full automation to the task -- "AI" to your seat at the wheel.

"This is how we live. This is how we support our families," he said. "We've gotta fight for it. There's too many times you hear" people complaining about this or that, but "when it comes time to do something about it, everybody goes quiet. ... People need to put in an effort doing something about it, and standing up."

Justice speaks to his own motivation in the suit here, but it dovetails with trucking, too. How long before significant numbers of drivers are displaced is anybody’s guess. We’ve seen recent cases of pro drivers voicing concerns on those and other, safety grounds directly to the U.S. Department of Transportation and Congress, too. In short, the effort to raise the alarm is getting hotter: https://overdriveonline.com/15828271

Justice is clearly motivated to take up the cause of fellow independent artists like himself, on the road to protecting that talent he’s got. As his comments suggest, though, more truckers might soon be motivated to do the same with theirs.

As mentioned in the podcast:

**Phillip Couch's "New Testament" custom Freightliner: https://overdriveonline.com/15817421

**Justice v. Suno: https://overdriveonline.com/15830530

Subscribe to Overdrive's daily newsletter or weekly Pride & Polish newsletter for trucking news and analysis, and some of the best in custom rigs at truck shows around the country: https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe

77bfae20-999a-11f1-b7b7-c5a46ed3a0e3

What’s happened to broker transparency? Owner-operators were asking that more than a year ago now, just a few months into the Trump administration, with a late 2024 rulemaking proposal released but no further action then yet taken by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15746061

In this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio, we bring transparency up because, yet again, a target date has come and gone for a supplemental proposed rule FMCSA had on the recent agenda for publication in July. I don’t have an answer as to a more realistic timeline, but what I can say we’ve got plenty more evidence timing is on the minds of many an owner-operator.

Overdrive’s recently released broker-related research report -- https://overdriveonline.com/15829986 -- based on the survey responses of hundreds of you, asked directly for transparency-related viewpoint. More than half of owner-operators strongly favored FMCSA's late-2024 proposal as written, and a third of respondents urged regulators to "move faster to finalize the proposal and get it across the finish line."

There’s evidence, too, that more owners have moved beyond worries over transparency to bypass the broker altogether in efforts to secure direct freight. For owner-operators with active businesses among survey respondents, few relied on just a single broker, and 60% reported at least some direct customers. That number's up since we last asked the question about freight partners more than two years ago now in early 2024.

Today on the podcast, we’re stepping back in time again to 2024, for the second part of my long talk with small fleet owner Surinder Gill of Gill Freightines. If you missed the part 1 re-air last week, find it here: https://overdriveonline.com/15669109

If Gill’s made good on goals voiced back then, he’s now among owners who’ve made it a priority to get past bottom-dollar brokers and build that long-term direct business to sustain. As he put it last year, effectively, speaking for himself and similarly situated small fleets: "Hey shippers, we're out here!" Ready to do business, ready to serve.

Step back in time with him here today, and keep in mind the time period of the original airing in late-April 2024, again, with mentions of the Convoy brokerage’s collapse and all the money owed to Gill, and his efforts at recourse. There are a myriad potential avenues in that regard when a broker fails or simply walks away from the deal at delivery and disappears.

Find your owner-operator peers’ experience charted extensively in the new report. You can download it via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15829986

More insight on getting closer to those direct customers in these two parts of Overdrive's Partners in Business library, a comprehensive guide to owner-operator carreers: https://overdriveonline.com/15708141

Subscribe to Overdrive's daily newsletter for trucking news and analysis: https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe

Since the original April 2024 airing of this edition of Overdrive Radio, our own research has underscored small fleet owner Surinder Gill's contention that the federal minimum bond requirement for brokers should vary in size, depending on the size of the broker's book of business. Nearly half of all 2026 respondents to Overdrive's survey expressed a similar view, and the vast majority felt the current $75,000 minimum bond was insufficent generally, as detailed in our recent special report: https://overdriveonline.com/15829986

When it comes to the actual filing of bond claims, too often the experience ends in frustration. 56% of survey respondents indicated experience filing a claim -- or threatening to -- as a means of nonpayment recourse against a broker. Owner-ops' most common response indicated a bad result. 28% reported wasted labor: They were never paid.

Gill's story as originally told in April 2024 follows in this summary:

Manteca, California, Gill Freightlines small fleet owner Surinder Gill's family's trucking lineage traces back through 60 years of OTR work done by his father, Gurmail Singh Gill, over more than one continent. The elder Gill hauled first in his native India, some in the Middle East, and finished out his career in the United States.

Surinder Gill had dipped his feet in trucking as a dispatcher by the time his father passed in 2018. "I wanted to do something to honor my father," Gill said. "How do I honor my father and his legacy? So we purchased a truck and got a trailer, and I put his photo on the back."

His trailers to this day feature that photo and the "In loving memory" text for Gurmail Singh Gill.

"He'll always be on the road, in a way," as his son puts it in this edition of Overdrive Radio, telling that story but much else besides. Small fleet owner Gill was in part the subject of Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie's reporting on the now-infamous collapse of the Convoy company as a going brokerage concern this past Fall. That reporting told the tale of a variety of owner-operators and small fleet owners just like 28-year-old Surinder Gill who, months following the abrupt shuttering of Convoy in October, remained unpaid for in some cases thousands’ worth of work hauling: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15666087/convoys-unpaid-carriers-signing-back-up-to-haul-loads

In Gill’s case, unpaid invoices were to the tune of around $35,000 in dedicated contract loads his several company drivers and a larger number of owner-operators pulled for big names in canning and food generally, like the Post company.

Convoy's debt to Gill alone is nearly half of the worth of the required $75,000 bond any broker is required to have to cover claims. As you'll hear in the podcast, Gill believes that bond amount shouldn't but a static number but rather dependent on the amount of business a broker handles. Larger the broker, larger the bond.

Independent and step deck-hauling owner-operator Ruben Dotto, headquartered in central Florida, was Overdrive’s Trucker of the Month for June. He's most certainly seen positive pressure rise on brokered rates, particularly for the heavy-equipment and machinery side of his outbound-from-Florida business this year.

Good in the short term, for certain, but no matter the market conditions Dotto's poised to make hay when the sun shines, keeping costs in check by handling most maintenance on his big-bunk T660 Kenworth himself. He's certainly not afraid to get the hands (and more) dirty -- as a picture of him after pressure-washing the underside of both truck and trailer on the cover of this week's podcast makes abundantly clear.

Yet when a dirty broker muddied up a load by ghosting him on $3,800 worth of a Los Angeles-Nebraska partial, the experience strengthened resolve to vet any unfamiliar middleman more fully on the front end. For any broker not approved for credit by his current OTR Solutions factoring company, he insists on payment before unload in nonnegotiable terms as a condition of any deal. More often, though, he just declines to do business if the broker's credit standing is in question, a common approach among owner-operators.

Download our recently-released special report, based on responses from 100s of owner-operators in Overdrive’s audience, to gain insight on the extent of the problems of fraud and nonpayment in brokered freight markets, likewise tactical insights on ways to mitigate getting involved with the bad actors: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15829986

For this podcast, we spoke both to Ruben Dotto and his wife, Michelle, about their two decades-plus in business with authority. The Dottos' story in trucking started with Ruben hauling hotshot pulling nursery freight, but the seeds for it were sewn even farther back, Ruben riding along with his father as a boy growing up in Argentina: https://overdriveonline.com/15828710

Nominate an owner-operator you admire, or your own business (up to 3 trucks), for Overdrive's Trucker of the Year honor via https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

And: To check out owner-operator Dustin Ross's absolutely pristine custom Sterling truck, as mentioned, follow this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15676650/impressive-custom-2000-sterling-uses-adapted-peterbilt-chrome

"The set-up packet didn't even contain a contract. ... [and] would come back and would get thrown into a manila folder, thrown into a file and forgotten, and you were using the truck." --Roar Logistics Senior Manager Scott Filipetti on many brokers' carrier set-up processes in the days of yore

What brokers call "carrier onboarding” has certainly evolved mightily from the process Roar Logistics' Scott Filipetti describes off the top of this week's podcast. We’re talking the process by which brokers get a carrier set up within their systems to haul shipper customers’ freight, likewise ongoing monitoring of the basics of compliance with insurance and other requirements.

Gone are the days of the manila folder, for certain. Today, Roar's Filipetti notes, the company utilizes the Highway company's service to manage onboarding, vetting and ongoing monitoring of owner-operators and other carriers that work with the company, in addition to a set of standard operating procedures you’ll hear him describe in this Overdrive Radio edition.

Increasingly automated, detailed vetting by brokers all around trucking is aimed in part at backstopping liability, with new urgency given the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that killed off brokers’ old standard defense against negligence suits in state courts after an accident.

Filipetti knows the risk there -- unlike the prior broker featured after the SCOTUS ruling, Jennifer Mead of S2 International, Roar’s actually experienced a post-crash suit in Filipettt’s time there. Roughly six-seven years ago, he said, the company wasn’t successful getting it thrown out in total. Yet they did keep it out of a jury trial with a settlement, at least, which Filipetti attributes in part to the broker’s consistent approach to carriers, sticking to those SOPs, and documenting everything.

But also, fundamentally, the company takes an approach to carriers that places real value on relationships, still likely the biggest driver of the business it does with carriers today.

At the same time, as information available about carrier operations and safety performance has gone from the trickle of old to an absolute flood of potential sources over the last decades, Filipetti stands firm in the conviction that clearcut guidance for brokers and shippers is needed -- what they absolutely have to do in checking any carrier’s official credentials, and just what they don’t.

"It would be nice if the FMCSA had some type of standard that we and other brokers, and shippers, could follow," he said. He's in favor of the general approach of the Transportation Intermediaries Association is pushing for a "hiring standard," he added.

Clarity in such a standard might benefit carriers, too, whether through expanded opportunities or generally less invasive intrusions into their businesses by vetting services in the wake of the court's ruling. Much more on that front in the podcast.

Roar Logistics has been a Broker of the Year in the Naitonal Association of Small Trucking Companies’ Best Brokers program more than once in the last decade. That honor goes to a single broker every year during NASTC's annual conference, where Overdrive also honors four fleets as finalists in the Small Fleet Champ awards program each year. Time is running out to enter to compete in the program for those among you who are between 3 and 30 trucks. Get into the running at https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc by July 31. Hope to see you there.

As mentioned in the podcast:

**Watch for our survey of owner-operators about broker vetting and more to publish this week: https://overdriveonline.com/business

**Roar Logistics' website: https://roarlogistics.com

Off the top of the podcast this week, a personal invite to all the small fleet owners in the audience to take this final month to get into the competition that is Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship. Time is ticking down fast to the July 31 deadline to compete to be one of four finalists who will net a trip with us to the annual conference of National Association of Small Trucking Companies in Nashville in October.

Every year, we end up telling the stories and sharing the business best practices exemplified by so many hardworking owners around the country, and we’d love the opportunity to share yours, particularly in light of this freight-market uptick we’ve seen this year so far after four truly difficult years all around trucking. Right on time, too, for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

For any independent among you whose made your own declaration, grown to at least three trucks, and exceled through the tough times, July 31 is the deadline to get into the running here: https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc

This week and next, keep an eye out for features we’ll be resharing with check-ins with each finalist from the 2025 Championship -- including 3-10-truck category winner Wes Oberman, whom you heard here on Overdrive Radio several weeks back: https://overdriveonline.com/15825397 Likewise 11-30-truck champ TFX.

Find it all via https://overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ

Hope to see your company’s name in the running, no doubt.

Otherwise, the podcast is dominated by the voice of Overdrive contributor Mike Singleton, former second-career OTR truck driver and writer who’s clearly got a gift for story, for capturing the chance moment OTR, the relationships formed and lost, the disasters experienced: https://overdriveonline.com/15774442

You’ve probably seen some of Singleton’s short tales of OTR joy and hardship, finding humor even in the big mistakes made. Yeah, even the one you’ll hear about today, a bad angle taken to a parking spot that truly left a mark on his reefer trailer -- other marks, too.

"There are mistakes you make on the road and forget by the next fuel stop," Singleton narrates at the top, "Then there are the ones that get named. This one got named."

Here, we’ll walk through Singleton’s journey in trucking in fairly recent years after a decades-long career in information technology, and his route to a project he’s calling “The Blacktop Chronicles,” part of which is the series of short stories charting moments OTR that we’ve been publishing since late last Fall occasionally on the Ovedrive Extra blog: https://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra

Hear much more about it in Overdrive editor Todd Dills' talk with the Texan and former OTR driver, current writer and Richmond, Va., resident, Mike Singleton, today.

Sign up for Overdrive's newsletter *https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe* for your daily dose of trucking regulatory, business, and lifestyle news and views -- and more Overdrive Radio.

This week in Overdrive Radio, a sitdown talk with Tennessee Highway Patrol Lieutenant Christopher Brooks I recorded during the first day of Roadcheck in May. You may have heard parts of the conversation in the video two weeks back that centered on one of Roadcheck's primary focus areas in remote electronic-logging-device manipulation, chameleon carriers and all that’s happening at federal and state levels to target bad actors in that regard: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15827779

Or lack thereof. In our accounting with Overdrive’s RigDig sister company tracking enforcement trends in the violation data, as of today Tennessee’s still only issued a few violations for out-of-service ELD tampering, unlike other jurisdictions: https://overdriveonline.com/15826126

But as Brooks notes in the podcast, they’re least learning. With federal investigatory efforts in partnership, he’s hopeful the wide fraud problem can ultimately be eliminated to keep unfair competition from truly bad-actor chameleons out of the market.

More importantly for most of you, hear plenty from the Lieutenant about ways you might prep for the next blitz, the Operation Safe Driver Week traffic enforcement initiative happening July 12-18 nationwide.

Last week, we published rankings of state truck enforcement departments looking at moving violations issued as a percent of the total. Tennessee sits pretty high on that list, and that's no accident, according to Lt. Brooks. The state’s moved to prioritize traffic stops and Level 3 driver-credentials inspections increasingly over the years, certifying virtually the entire state highway patrol's road trooper force to Level 3.

The talk overall could be instructive with respect to getting ready for July roadside week. Brooks emphasizes ways to prep throughout for these kinds of expanded enforcement initiatives. At once, the week might not be quite what it used to be when it comes enforcement intensity overall, if CVSA-published numbers are any indication. Warnings/citations issued as a result of stepped-up efforts targeting both passenger-vehicle drivers and commercial truckers are way down from highs in 2020, as shown in the chart below in this post: https://overdriveonline.com/15828850

Just where those warnings and citation go, though, has clearly has shifted across jurisdictions back to the commercial-trucker side of the equation, since at least 2023. In places like Tennessee, where a large majority of troopers are certified to complete Level 3 inspections, expect credentials/hours checks to accompany most traffic stops during the week, yet full driver/truck inspections are always a possibility.

Brooks emphasized the importance of preparation for these kinds of all-hands-on-deck enforcement efforts, starting the talk with reference to the equipment focus of Roadcheck this year -- load securement. That’s a category where Tennessee’s truly something of outlier.

In our enforcement rankings for 2025, the state ranked No. 1 on the list of states with the highest percentage of overall load securement violations among states nationwide. For the moving violations in focus during Operation Safe Driver Week, Tennessee's at No. 11 nationwide.

You've got roughly two weeks left to prep.

"It really makes a world of difference. ... A little planning ahead of time" will help inspectors "get you back on the road, get the wheels back moving and reduce the time it takes to make that inspection."

As mentioned in the podcast:

**THP's Motor Carrier Plus specialized unit: https://www.tn.gov/safety/tnhp/cvemain.html

**Recent accounting of ELP OOS violations nationwide: https://overdriveonline.com/15828727

An extra-special edition of Overdrive Radio this week, handing the mic over to our own Long Haul Paul and, with the narration this week for the scene out at Large Cars & Guitars last month in Bristol, Tennessee, another of Overdrive's own in regular contributor Bobbi McGee. Her story will be live early Monday, June 22, 2026: https://overdriveonline.com/15828174

There at the truck show, three drivers were recognized together for quite an astounding achievement.

Hard to fully comprehend what it might take to lay down 7 million safe miles over the course of a trucking career. We're not sure anyone can fully wrap their heads around it, but the fact remains that these three have all done it, with more than 21 million miles between.

And at the now many-years-running Large Cars & Guitars show, Candy Bass, Eddie Parrish and Mike Brown came together all in one place to be honored for the accomplishment. LHP and McGee sat with the three to deliver today with two perspectives on what have been, and continue to be, genuinely amazing careers over-the-road. Hear LHP's take in the podcast, and catch the story in the post that houses the episode at the website for McGee's salute to them.

We can all echo McGee when she wrote, "Here’s hats-off to these three. It was a honor to be in their presence."

Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter -- https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe -- to stay up to date on the latest trucking business and regulattory news, custom rigs and more.