Overdrive Radio
The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio
Episodes
January 12, 2026 • 47 mins
Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio, Kevin Rutherford recalls his first time on a stage speaking to a roomful of owner-operators, back in 1999 at the Mid-America Trucking Show as part of Overdrive's Partners in Business seminar series at the time.
The first question he asked the room was for a show of hands among those who had ready access to a detailed accounting of their business performance, such a profit and loss state...
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January 5, 2026 • 53 mins
Year 2025 is in the rear view, just back there behind the trailer. With any luck at all, owner-operators are making good time outrunning all that happened during what was some kind of a momentous year in and around trucking. As my colleague Alex Lockie put it in his year-in-review last week just ahead of New Year celebrations, 2025 may well go down as the year when the you-know-what truly "hit the fan" in trucking: https://overdriv...
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December 27, 2025 • 17 mins
We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas last week, and looks ahead with hope for improved conditions for the new year. To get in right frame of mind, what better than to drop back into this special edition around Christmastime 2022, when we drop in on quite an experience for Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie out at the Danbury, Connecticut, stop on the Wreaths Across America convoy tour from Maine down to Arlington National Cem...
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December 22, 2025 • 22 mins
Despite a record turnout in early December, trucker Noah Melton of small fleet Big P Express out of Southwest Michigan isn't 100% satisfied. Melton's one of the organizers of the Red Arrow Convoy, running 45 miles along the Red Arrow Highway near Lake Michigan every year for the past three, and growing in size and participation, that's certain. A grand total 89 trucks participated this year: https://www.facebook.com/groups/23219027...
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December 15, 2025 • 25 mins
"Every day had an episode like that along the way. It was just the high, and the low." --XPO driver David May, reflecting on the roller coaster of emotion hauling in the Maine-to-Arlington Naitonal Cemetery run of Wreaths Across America
Off the top of the podcast, we dive right into the experience of military veteran and longtime professional driver David May, trucking out of the Buffalo, New York, area and speaking the range of e...
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December 8, 2025 • 36 mins
As you'll hear off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio podcast, this “exit interviews” part 2 in our final run to conclude Overdrive's Trucker of the Year competition for 2025 features an all-flatbedders group. You’ll hear a bit of what some call "bygone" driver-to-driver camaraderie amongst the four owner-operators featured around -- what else -- the subject of tarping.
Arkansas-headquartered Scott Smith, owner-operator of Sa...
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Catastrophic engine failure delivers customer calamity: How one owner-operator prepped for the worst
December 1, 2025 • 38 mins
December’s here, and it’s time for the big push through to 2026 and opportunity a new year always brings a business owner to set goals, to lay plans and start acting on them. Yet as you’ll hear in this edition of Overdrive Radio, it’s also true that in so many ways the time for all of that is now, for any small trucking business owner, at any given moment. Like a football coach responding to what the opposing team throws at his own...
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November 24, 2025 • 37 mins
Off the top of the Overdrive Radio podcast this week is the voice of fuel-payments provider Wex's Vice President of Global Anti-Financial Crimes William Fitzgerald, laying out a 1 in 12,000 transaction rate for detection of fraud over the company's entire fuel-payments network. That is, 1 in every 12,000 purchases are flagged as suspiscious, potentially fraudulent, and blocked in automated fashion among its millions upon millions o...
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November 17, 2025 • 33 mins
This week's Overdrive Radio edition puts a wrap up our series featuring 2025 Trucker of the Year contenders with the story of Orleans, Indiana-headquartered John Penn, his one-truck business operating with authority and hauling finished furniture on multistop runs West and/or South from his home base, other brokered freight back.
He’s the owner of another power unit, too, that he keeps as a spare, both rigs Freightliner Cascadias...
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November 11, 2025 • 36 mins
Today, a special edition of Overdrive Radio marks the federal Veterans Day holiday, commemorating the military service of so many around the United States. In the podcast, in particular, we'll honor the stories of two vets -- Army and Navy, respectively -- who are equally clear-eyed emphasizing what their service meant for their long careers in trucking business ownership.
After medically retiring from the Army as an E6 Staff Serg...
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November 3, 2025 • 43 mins
This week's edition of Overdrive Radio drops into our awards ceremony October 23, 2025, with four Small Fleet Champs -- the owners of Clifford Hay Inc., Thomasville Funiture Xpress, Turnage & Sons, and Oberman Logistics all on hand for the event in Nashville, Tennessee. Before the dinnertime program got started that fine Thursday evening, Overdrive editor Todd Dills had the chance to sit down with all of the owners, with results in...
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October 27, 2025 • 28 mins
"Be on-time, put out the extra effort. ... No matter what you're going to be in life, be the best."
--Owner-operator John Treadway on his motivation through the years
Raised to “be the best” at whatever he did, owner-operator John Treadway is clearly working hard to achieve that lofty goal with his one-truck business. It's a two-truck business, actually, with Treadway trucking with his own authority mostly in a stunningly beautif...
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October 20, 2025 • 68 mins
This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features the semi-annual ATBS owner-operator income benchmarking session delivered in late September by ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted. The audio contains the full presentation, but know that there's a video version accessible via the Youtube version at this link: https://youtu.be/CYxCHAb1RnY
To follow along with the audio here, download a bevy of detailed slides charting cost, r...
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October 13, 2025 • 23 mins
Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio episode one thing's clear. Longtime Alaska-based truck driver Lisa Kelly is now a business owner. That's right, in the very long time since Overdrive editor Todd Dills last spoke to her (though not the last time you read about her in Overdrive), she bought a 2019 Peterbilt 389 and leased on with a company to work Alaska's Dalton Highway (the "Haul Road," as its known): https://www.overdriv...
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October 6, 2025 • 56 mins
No news has been bigger in trucking this year than the DOT’s announcement Friday, September 26, of changes to the rules around non-domiciled CDL issuance, effective now: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15767991/fmcsa-to-force-nearly-200k-nondomiciled-cdl-holders-out-of-trucking
New restrictions on issuance hold potential to limit foreign-domiciled CDL drivers' ability to work OTR in the U.S. The influx of asylu...
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September 26, 2025 • 19 mins
One of the trucking industry's biggest events, the biennial Guilty by Association Truck Show at 4 State Trucks in Joplin, Missouri, is officially under way at Exit 4 off I-44.
With hundreds of trucks in attendance (organizers expect 800+ to participate in the Saturday night convoy), the massive show sprawls across multiple businesses, including 4 State Trucks itself, the Joplin 44 Petro and Pilot truck stops across state highway 4...
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September 22, 2025 • 30 mins
How might truckers get back a measure of flexibility in the hours of service rules, such as that enjoyed by so many owner-operators of past generations? That is, the ability to split the 10-hour required rest period into two periods of any length they want. That’s the option favored by a whopping 88% of readers who responded to Overdrive polling around the subject this time last year, with results published earlier in the year show...
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September 15, 2025 • 30 mins
This week on the podcast, the voices of two semi-finalists for Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ award:
First, Robbie and Levi Turnage of Mississippi-headquartered tanker fleet Turnage and Sons, LLC. They're respectively fourth- and fifth-generation milk haulers who've made good on a business with a stable of dairymen in the region specializing in organic milk over two decades of so Robbie's grown the fleet from just a single tr...
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September 8, 2025 • 24 mins
"I want to honor my wife and her being the 'woman behind the man behind the wheel,' which is a high calling. Our first date ... was the day I bought that 1997 W9, so she didn't know what she was getting into." --August Trucker of the Month Jason Shelly
Jason Shelly starts this Part 2 of a series of Overdrive Radio episodes featuring the owner-operator with a tribute to Renita Shelly, who's been Shelly's "biggest fan," as she once...
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September 2, 2025 • 32 mins
"I spend a lot of time making deliveries around here, so I have my little spots I know I can park." --Owner-operator Jason Shelly, speaking to knowledge borne of more than two decades' experience serving customers in Amish markets on the East Coast
Those words were among the first owner-op Jason Shelly spoke when he talked to Overdrive Editor Todd Dills in early August attendant to reporting on his longtime one-truck business, ...
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