This week in trucking: California loses highway funds, USPS trims non-domiciled commercial drivers

These are the major trucking and transportation industy headlines this week:

Listen to the news on this week's episode of The Fleet Lead podcast here or search for The Fleet Lead on your favorite podcast app.

Summaries of the stories are below:

DOT cuts more of California’s funding

The Department of Transportation is withholding $160 million in federal highway funding from the state of California for failing to cancel over 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs.

USPS is trimming its use of non-domiciled CDLs

The U.S. Postal Service said that it is working with its contracted trucking providers to phase out any non-domiciled CDL holders that the agency has not personally vetted.

Autonomous truck companies announced new partnerships during the Consumer Electronics Show

In Las Vegas, autonomous trucking companies unveiled two new collaborations. Kodiak announced that Bosch will supply many hardware components for Kodiak’s autonomous truck platform. Aurora announced that the fallback system for the Aurora Driver, developed by Aumovio, will be hosted by Amazon Web Services.

Truck demand reached a three-year high in December

According to preliminary Class 8 truck order counts from FTR Transportation Intelligence and ACT Research, truck orders in December totaled roughly 42,400 units—the most since October 2022, by FTR’s count.

In fuel this week, diesel prices fell 2 cents

The national average on-highway diesel price fell to $3.48, according to the Energy Information Institute.