Somebody built a fake MOTUS

Good morning. Last week we thanked drivers. This week, a harder question about them: how does anyone prove a driver is who they say they are?

The answer, for most of the industry, is a file. So this issue is about what happens when the file goes quiet — and what the new identity checks write down instead.

Nothing broke. No screen went red. Carrier vetting kept returning answers all week — authority, insurance, inspections — drawn from a file that had stopped arriving.

INDICATIVE FIGURES. NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR PAID INTELLIGENCE.

Run your own: fuel.freightsignal.ai — the surcharge math is free and needs no account; pricing your own lane needs a Google sign-in (name and email only). Fuel Signal is ours (Logixtecs).

Sources: D.C. Circuit argument Sep 15; Land Line; Overdrive; FMCSA fraud alert Sep 14; FMCSA ELD registry.

What the checks record, and who keeps it

Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II removed the brokers’ early exit from negligent-selection suits in May. The industry’s answer has been to check harder at the moment of pickup. Highway’s Know Your Driver runs a live identity check — face, government ID, liveness — confirms the driver is near the pickup, and flags drivers assigned to several loads at once. Samsara sells a paper-thin Bluetooth label that rides the freight for 45 days.

Read that as a records question and it changes shape. A selfie and a government ID at a dock is biometric data, taken from the driver, held by a vendor, created to protect the broker from a liability a court invented in May. The driver is the subject of the record and a party to none of the agreements about it.

Retention terms are not public. So ask for them in writing:

Then the mirror question, the one this week raised: when the federal file behind your vetting screen stops updating for four days and nobody tells you, what record proves what you checked?

Your own dated vetting file

At booking, save one PDF into the load folder: the SAFER snapshot, the insurance certificate and the authority record, printed with the date and time visible. That is the whole tool.

It costs nothing and it answers the only question that matters later — not was the carrier safe? but what did you see, and when did you see it? When the federal file is four days stale, your dated copy is the only thing that records what the screen said at the moment you decided.

Vendors keep their own logs. Those are their records, not yours, and they are not obliged to hand them over on your schedule.

Humble — the hauler with no cab

Humble, in San Francisco, is building a cabless battery-electric hauler — a new platform, not a retrofitted Class 8. Its pitch is a machine that reasons like a human: a vision-language-action model that decides from what it sees, not from routes it was taught. Founder Eyal Cohen came from Waabi. 200 miles, 55 mph, 20% lighter, containers dock to dock.

The gap: not an over-the-road tractor, and “lowest per-mile cost” has no published number. Ask for one.

Driverless freight arrives where no rule was written: Kodiak tests on I-70 through Indiana, where the bill requiring a human in the cab failed.