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.
Penn's one-truck business operating with authority hauls finished furniture on multistop runs West and/or South from his home base, and other brokered freight back.
He’s the owner of second power unit, too, that he keeps as a spare, both rigs Freightliner Cascadias he details in the podcast and in this in-depth feature about his business, where he was named the October 2025 Trucker of the Month. Penn's Cascadias feature specs that help him achieve maximum fuel mileage -- upward of 9 miles per gallon in the older unit (10-speed manual transmission) and more than 10 mpg in his current 2019 model, with the DT12 automated manual transmission.
We didn’t know it when he first entered our Trucker of the Year competition, but he’s also the newest member of Freightliner’s Team Run Smart group of owner-operators, sharing their own successes in various ways for the benefit of anyone interested. When we published the October 31 story about Penn, Team Run Smart hadn't yet announced his involvement, though reps did confirm he was going to be a part of the team. What they didn’t tell us was they’d post his official intro video to their Youtube networks that very same day:
Find Penn and his contributions to the Run Smart program now via his profile page at this link. He's long operated the J.P. Transport Youtube Channel independently to share what he's learned with other owners, too.
Overdrive Radio's sponsor is Howes, longtime provider of fuel treatments like its Howes Diesel Defender all-weather mileage booster and winter Diesel Treat anti-gel treatments to get you through the coldest temps, the Howes Multipurpose penetrating oil, and other products.
His now eight-year relationship with the small broker/fleet he works with for his central outbound runs from the furniture manufacturer is of a piece. As he put it, "they live about 10 miles from where I do, so we know each other personally," he said. The furniture maker he treats "almost like it's my own customer," yet enjoys the flexibility of working through his real customer, the broker, to afford time off and the responsibility for service when he's on the other side of the country.
"I've had my own customers, and it's very hard for one truck to keep a big place like that happy, and you kinda need a big place like that to keep you busy," he said. "It just works better for me to go through a broker, really."
There's much more to his story in the podcast. Owner-operator Penn's modest about his success, yet it’s clear the owner’s doing quite a lot right with a very low operating ratio given his business’s efficiency, and with a home life that’s benefiting, too, as a result. Dive in with Penn from the very beginning, when he first got his CDL around the turn of the century, the start of a journey toward maximum trucking efficiency:
On the line for 2025 Trucker of the Year contenders are a seat from program sponsor Bostrom Seating, and a scale-model replica of the winning owner's tractor as trophy.
[Related: Truckers of the Month John Penn reaps 10-mpg-plug rewards of two decades learning, growing]
