Diesel set a record. Did your surcharge?

Good morning — and to every driver reading this during Truck Driver Appreciation Week, thank you. ATA counts nearly 3.6 million of you, moving more than 72% of the country’s freight by weight.

Last Tuesday I promised two things: to show the fuel-surcharge arithmetic, and to build the thing that runs it for you. The arithmetic is below, and the calculator is live.

That is the number most fuel surcharges are indexed to. So we opened the Department of Energy’s own fuel-surcharge schedule — the table the federal government uses for its freight — to see what it says now.

If the federal table is a week behind, check yours. The arithmetic is short.

INDICATIVE FIGURES. NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR PAID INTELLIGENCE.

Sources: FreightWaves, Motive, Highway, Samsara, U.S. Supreme Court, Land Line.

Three numbers, and the day nobody re-runs them

Every per-mile fuel surcharge is the same calculation:

The index is EIA’s weekly average. The base price is the fuel cost already inside your linehaul rate. MPG is your fleet’s — not the brochure’s.

DOE’s schedule adds 1 cent a mile for every 5 cents of diesel. It doesn’t print where the table starts, so we worked that out from its rows: $2.20, a 5 mpg assumption. That rule reproduces all 499 weekly rows DOE has published since February 2017, exactly.

Now a typical small fleet: $2.50 base, 6.5 mpg. At this week’s $5.967, the surcharge is (5.967 − 2.50) ÷ 6.5 = 53 cents a mile.

If that table was last updated four weeks ago, at $5.257, it is billing 42 cents — 11 cents short on every mile. At 2,500 miles, about $273 a week, per truck.

Nobody’s formula is wrong the day it is set. It goes wrong the Monday EIA prints and nobody runs it again.

That is the part worth automating, and it is small: one weekly number, one subtraction, one division. DOE runs its table on exactly that schedule — Monday’s price, effective Wednesday.

Run yours at fuel.freightsignal.ai: your base price, your MPG, and the price your table was last set at.

AI email agents — and the 18-hour thank-you

One team emailed four brokerages with everyone in the To line instead of BCC. According to Kevin Acosta’s LinkedIn post, the AI email agents on the other end then thanked each other — “Thanks, take care!” — for more than 18 hours over the long weekend.

The screenshot in his post shows an agent named Buzz replying to agents named Augie and Max, minutes apart. Buzz is what NTG calls its Augment agent, per Augment’s own case study; Augie is Augment’s default name. None of the three companies has commented publicly.

WATCH, not IGNORE: these agents do real work, and the failure was not a badly written email. It was automation with no stop condition — which is a question you can ask any vendor.