In this edition of Overdrive Radio find audio from part of Max Heine’s talk with owner-operator John Strong, recently off the road, about his involvement in the 1970s and beyond in advocacy efforts with Overdrive founder Mike Parkhurst, his memories of the old Mass 10 truck stop, and much more. (If you missed Max Heine’s distillation of a particular sketch made of Strong and a friend on a visit to Overdrive‘s then-Los Angeles offices, catch it via this link.) Along the way, parallels between the advocacy bent of owner-ops in 1970s trucking and more recent times stands out, in more ways than one.
Anybody in the audience haul in one of these? We’ll have coverage of the cargo van expediting niche in more depth in the April issue. Tips, thoughts on opportunities and challenges? Drop me a note: [email protected].Following at around the 8 minute mark is more from my own talk with Load One head John Elliott centered here around the cargo van niche in the expedited truck space. Being under 10,001 lbs., hauling in a cargo van on its face would seem to check several boxes as a solution to a lot of the headaches — hours of service, scales, parking — Class 8 tractor-trailer owner-ops deal with, except when it comes to placardable hazmat loads. And that’s not to mention lower cost barriers to entry into the market as well, with much lower new-vehicle purchase prices. At once, though, challenges abound, and Elliott describes a multitude of those in detail from his perspective, from difficulty competing with a multicarrier model rife with insurance shortcuts and artificial supply, having a deleterious effect on rates in some instances.
(If you missed it, find the previous part of the talk with Elliott in the Overdrive Radio edition at this link.) Take a listen:
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