America’s top private fleets operate almost 1.4 million trucks and tractors in relative anonymity. While for-hire carriers are highly visible as trucking businesses, private fleets fill a wide variety of support roles in the service of many different types of businesses, working in manufacturing operations, servicing petroleum exploration and extraction, delivering the materials for construction projects big and small, collecting our trash, supporting local and national utility grids, delivering field technicians and their tools to assignments, or keeping food on store shelves.
For the 13th year, the annual Fleet Owner 500 shines a light on these often underappreciated but essential trucking enterprises, ranking the 500 largest by the number of tractors and trucks they operate and identifying the industries they serve.
This annual list of the country’s 500 largest private fleets is recreated every year by FleetSeek.com using a combination of direct email surveys, various public and proprietary databases, and even phone calls to verify the numbers. While that helps ensure an accurate, up-to-date list, it also means we need to avoid making statistical assumptions about direct year-to-year comparisons. Note: All numbers are rounded to the nearest 5 to smooth the variances in individual fleet reporting.
However, the Fleet Owner 500’s aggregate numbers certainly do reveal overall trends among private fleets, trends that reflect the country’s continued steady but moderate economic growth. For example, this year we saw the total number of trucks and tractors operated by the Top 500 increase by over 8%. Also reflecting the relative economic stability regained after the last downturn, this year’s list shows virtually no change in either the largest fleet rankings nor in the top five fleets in each of the nine general business categories we track. And the ranking of top fleets by tractors and by straight trucks also remains unchanged.
If you’d like to have your private fleet considered for inclusion in next year’s Fleet Owner 500, send contact information to Scott Gardner at [email protected].
For those who want to share the Fleet Owner 500, reprints are available and a digital version can be found at fleetowner.com. A database version with more detailed fleet information is also available, as is online access to FleetSeek’s extensive data on both private and for-hire fleets. For ordering and price information, contact Reggie Lawrence at reggie.lawrence @penton.com.
