Further down the spiral

Welcome to the WHAT THE TRUCK?!? Newsletter presented by XPO. In this issue, markets continue their collapse; Amazon drivers delivering during Ian; man rides on back of semi for 100 miles; robot french fry apocalypses; Tesla ditches sensors; and more.

What goes up…

Mount SONAR — When rates made their rapid ascent in July 2021, creating a wall that Alex Honnold would have trouble free soloing, there was bound to be a cliff on the other end. The other shoe dropped this spring when shippers, buried under mounds of inventory, began canceling orders en masse. Rates dropping could be a great thing for the consumer as it eases inflation. However, this rapid drop is hell for carriers and shippers who just spent two years reconfiguring their supply chains and capacity to contend with the summit of rate mountain not the plateau.

“Rates could fall even further. As Greg Miller reported yesterday, the number of new ships coming onto the market is at unprecedented levels. With demand collapsing, it will be difficult for carriers to maintain pricing discipline.” — FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller

The cavalry has arrived … too late — Greg Miller nailed the cyclical cycle of self-abuse in carrier shipping in his latest article when he stated, “Shipping adheres to a time-honored tradition: When shipowners make exceptionally high profits, they order a lot of new vessels. When those newbuilds are delivered by the yards, it kills shipowners’ profits.” As rates collapse from $22,000 to $2,200, ship builders have a record number of new orders on the books. People wondering if the “new normal” of rates would stick now have their answer. No. It only took the ocean carriers two and half years to reduce back to the mean.

It’s happening in trucking too — FreightWaves DailyWatch noted Thursday morning that trucking fleet counts are accelerating as spot rates cool. In capacity-driven markets, this is an ominous equation as generally volume +/- capacity = rates. The more capacity there is, the less everyone else can charge. This is especially bad right now for truckload carriers as insurance, fuel and the cost of trucks have all stayed elevated. Let’s hope everyone invested those record profits wisely because winter isn’t coming, it’s here.

Amazon sends drivers into the storm?

“After a tornado destroyed half my neighborhood last year, I recall seeing an Amazon delivery guy just standing in an intersection surrounded by debris, unsure which pile of wreckage the package he was holding was meant for.” — Redditor Sempais_nutrients

I hate y’all — Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail, nor tornado, nor hurricane shall keep the Amazonians from their appointed rounds. TikToking Amazon delivery driver AbnormalPoet documented his rounds and took his frustration out on consumers, saying, “Y’all knew this hurricane was coming and you still order s**t. I gotta go to 172 of y’all today. I hate y’all. Everything is wet.” This raises the question, should the consumer take weather into account when ordering on Amazon or should Amazon instead suspend deliveries if weather is too poor to be safe … or the neighborhood has been leveled by a tornado?

Man rides over 100 miles hanging on the back of semi

Not in Kansas anymore — Just before 2:30 am, Logan County deputies started receiving a series of unbelievable phone calls. A man was spotted hanging off the back of a semi traveling at highway speeds.

“When you get a phone call like that, you’re like, oh, is that what they’re really seeing or is there something else going on?” — Trooper Eric Foster, with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, on News4

It turns out, 30-year-old Dustin Michael Slocum hitched a ride on the back of a rig that was at a yard in Wichita, Kansas. By the time the semi pulled over due to being flagged by other motorists, it had gone over 100 miles to Guthrie, Oklahoma. Slocum was charged with public intoxication and joyriding. But why did he do it in the first place? According to Guthrie News Page, “Slocum told deputies he had hopped on in hopes of finding his wife (in Kansas).” As absurd as this is, it sounds like this guy could use some rehab and counseling instead of a jail cell.

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Tesla ditches ultrasonic sensors

Elon Musk as drawn by Redditor WatchieBoy

Why has Tesla been shedding sensors? — Just as Elon Musk and Tesla hype their latest “Full Self-Driving” software, their vehicles seem to be going backward in safety design. Reuters reports that “Tesla said it will remove ultrasonic sensors from the Model 3 and Model Y globally over the next few months, followed by the Model S and Model X in 2023.”

Tesla says, “Along with the removal of USS, we have simultaneously launched our vision-based occupancy network — currently used in Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta — to replace the inputs generated by USS.” This comes after the company has already removed radar sensors due to last year’s chip shortage. What do you think? Good move by Telsa or is it sacrificing safety to hit production targets?

Welcome our new robot overlords

Would you like fries with that, Dave? — Automation heads to the fry station with Miso Robotics’ Flippy 2 robot. The Pasadena, California-based robotics corporation claims Mr. Beep Boop over there can cook fries better than any human. Well, I’d like to challenge this robot to a fry-off. What it doesn’t know is I spent a couple of my teen years at McDonald’s and have dropped a fry basket or two.

“When we put a robot into a location, the customers that come up and order, they all take pictures, they take videos, they ask a bunch of questions. And then the second time they come in, they seem not to even notice it, just take it for granted.” — Miso Chief Executive Mike Bell to KSL

Would you like to supersize that robot apocalypse? —You see that statement above? That’s exactly how I was treated by customers at the golden arches. But I wasn’t networked and I didn’t have robot arms to stage an uprising. Can you imagine how pissed the AI in these things will eventually get at annoying customers? Apparently these things are already plotting our demise at a Jack in the Box and a White Castle.

Even the CEO admits that people will one day “walk into a restaurant and look at a robot and say, ‘Hey, remember the old days when humans used to do that kind of thing?’”

One day? I was in McDonald’s Wednesday and couldn’t find a human to serve me. They’ve already moved the ordering away from the register and seem to only staff drive-thru and cooks now. Let me tell you something, it was a better experience when there were people. You and me, Flippy 2, let’s do that fry-off.

WTT Friday

How same-day delivery works, inside hot shotting, and reinventing how drivers get paid — Friday on WHAT THE TRUCK?!? The Dude and me are learning the logic and logistics behind same-day delivery; we’ll discover how one company is reinventing how drivers get paid; get the details on how hotshotting works; and talk about achieving end-to-end automation between carrier booking and customer booking.

With special guests Omar Singh, founder and president at Surge Transportation; Kevin Huang, founder at Trucking Up; Nourhan Beyrouti, senior director of corporate marketing and brand at Delivery Solutions; and Richard Sharp, hotshot operations at Diligent Delivery Systems.

Catch new shows live at noon ET Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on FreightWavesTV, FreightWaves YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook or on demand by looking up WHAT THE TRUCK?!? on your favorite podcast player.

Now on demand

Trevor Milton’s American greed and ocean rates collapse