The trucking industry today is no monopoly. With over 500,000 carrier companies that own trucks in the US, the trucking industry has become very competitive and very small business oriented. Trucking today takes up over 28% of the for-hire transportation industry.
Source: US Department of transportation
To get a breakdown of just how decentralized the industry is today, here are some facts. There are over 800,000 trucks on the road today all being owned and operated by carrier companies. 90% of these carrier companies own fewer than 6 trucks and over 50% of these companies are single individuals who own and operate their truck independently.
Outside of truck driving, there are middle men, the freight brokers. These 13,000 Freight broker companies act like trucking agents, assigning truckers a load to ship by working with companies who need stuff transported.
As you can see the trucking industry is very decentralized with no big corporations controlling a majority of the shipping industry.
Because of this, there is no universal software that truckers use to log their cargo, distance traveled, and gas used. In fact, over 65% of truckers log these statistics on paper. This creates a tremendous amount of inefficiency when every log has to be communicated between human interactions. Paper logging causes trucks to wait hours to get a shipping order or sometimes getting no orders at all. An estimated 20% of trucks on the road today are driving empty.
Because of this, investors are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars to craft a silver bullet, an electronic logging device that can be used by everyone in the industry. This would connect the network of truckers on the road, eliminating inefficiencies.
There are a few startups I have been looking into that aim to solve this issue. One of the biggest being KeepTruckin (https://keeptruckin.com/). Think of Keep Trucking as an sql database that easily logs statistics for truckers. By downloading the KeepTruckin cell phone app truckers can easily find loads to carry and record their loads for them. Keep trucking offers dashcam networks uploading content into a database for larger trucking corporations to use. I think the convenience factor of this app makes it very easy to use.
Another startup in this sector I am confident about is BlockArray (https://blockarray.com/). Blockchain supports the decentralized nature of the industry by providing a public distributed blockchain for truckers to log loads. This project is still in development, but I am confident that Blockchain has a valuable use case in this industry.
I can see a massive change in the logging for trucks in the near future. As more trucking companies switch to electric vehicles, more trucks will also switch to electronic logging devices. In the next 10 years we will see a massive switch in the industry. It will be exciting to watch which startups come out on top.