Unpacking trucking's ‘FUN’ future. Is this the new normal?

COLUMBUS, Indiana—The future of trucking looks like a forecasting nightmare. Just when it seems like the prolonged freight recession is hitting bottom, it stalls out. Every time the U.S. economy looks like it’s headed for a crash, it holds steady or even grows. Everyone is staring at the same data, but the conclusions are all over the map.

“That’s the world that we live in: You can take the same set of facts and have three different people analyze them and come up with four different opinions or conclusions,” Steve Tam, an ACT Research VP and analyst, said after three industry econominists laid out their outlook for the sluggish frieght market during ACT’s Market Vitals seminar here.

Jim Meil, a longtime industry economist who announced his plans to retire later this year as ACT Research principal, summed up ACT’s 73rd seminar, which wrapped up on August 21, as the “FUN conference.”

Flat
Uncertainty
New Normal

“F is for flat, perhaps the second-most used word the last two days—or for fear, in some senses, for what could happen,” Meil said on stage as he and his colleagues shared their closing thoughts. 

“U is for the most used word, which is uncertainty—and unprofitability,” he said. “We’re going to need a change in uncertainty and unprofitability to turn things around.”

N, he said, stands for new normal. He pondered a question he was asked this week: Why has the trucking industry been calling the past three and a half years a freight recession? “Maybe the oddball was actually what happened in late 2021 and early 2022—that was the outlier,” he said. “Maybe this is the new normal.”

The pandemic-driven freight surge that raged into a freight fireball after 2020’s supply chain problems created generational freight market opportunities. That led to many new carriers, who today are among those struggling to keep up amid expanded capacity, and sluggish spot rates amid what is probably the most technologically transparent freight market in history—which has only highlighted how prolonged this downturn has been compared to past freight dips that bounced back within quarters—not years.

Think of how much easier it is today for a driver to find a load anywhere in the country compared to just 10 or 20 years ago. When one lane or region gets hot, every carrier can see it in real time. So as more drivers and small fleets chase those hot zones, they don’t stay hot for long. 

See also: Sitting on the sidelines is not a business strategy. In fact, it’s ruining your brand.

But all of this is happening as the U.S. economy recalibrates to Trump’s economic policy of tariffs and deregulation, upending many long-term business plans.

“I think the good news is we’re not forecasting a recession,” ACT analyst Carter Vieth said. “We still have economic growth. The bad news is that tariffs sort of put a speed limit on it—or a governor, if you will.”

ACT is forecasting below-replacement level Class 8 builds in 2026. “I think, to some extent, that correction was inevitable, but it got delayed by the growth of private fleets and pent-up demand coming into 2023 as we were coming out of the supply chain issues during the pandemic," Vieth said.

While a return to that post-pandemic boom appears unlikely, fleets need to focus on this new normal’s reality. Said Tam: “We’ve got all this data coming at us, we’ve got all these conditions, we simply have to be prepared for whatever the outcome is, whatever is going to hit us. We don’t know what it’s going to be, we don’t know when it’s going to be, we don’t know how quickly it’s going to change, but we have to react. And we will. And we do.”

ACT President Ken Vieth noted it’s hard to see through all the noise from tariffs and struggling manufacturing and housing markets. “But at some point, low prices are going to take capacity out of the market,” he said. “We are going to get that freight inflection… Everybody’s going to go from standing around to being asked to run very fast in a very short order.”