Drivers tend to be the restraining factor when it comes to trucking capacity, but by the end of next year, it may be a lack of equipment.
FTR CEO Jonathan Starks says carriers buy trucks to haul freight and, to haul freight, they need to buy trucks. With generationally low carrier profits pulling down orders and the market shedding capacity, this chicken-and-egg situation may come back to bite the industry in late 2026 and into 2027, the company's analysts said at its monthly State of Freight webinar Thursday.
The webinar started with an overview of available economic data; available being the key word because with the recent government shutdown, some months' information can't be used in FTR's forecasting because it's not available. A key figure that FTR does have was revised manufacturing output.
"Some years these are big deals, some years, not," Vice President of Trucking Avery Vise says. This one was a bigger deal, he says. For August, manufacturing output was revised down 1.4%.
[RELATED: Uncertainty continues to drive down 2026 forecasts]
Another thing to worry about is machinery production was revised downward 9%.
"That is a concern because machinery is used to produce other goods," Vise says, and a lack of production now could limit industrial production later.
The same thing is true of tractor production. Vise says 2025 was a weak year in terms of ordering. Now that there's clarity on tariff policies and the EPA's action on greenhouse gases, he says there may be some fleets pulling the trigger on purchases, but still, Class 8 net orders are down 36% year over year as the 2026 books open.
"If you play this out over time, this lower level of demand is potentially going to have implications in late 2026 and 2027 and beyond," Vise says, adding the cap on adding capacity is usually finding drivers. "This is a big deal if we have disruptions on both labor and equipment.
As far as the import and export market goes, Senior Analyst Joseph Towers says import volumes are slowing as the year ends, which wasn't unexpected after a tariff-driven import pull-forward at the beginning of the year. In exports, "things have been much more mild," staying essentially flat.
Towers also says there have been shifts in where imported goods are coming into the country. Goods that come into West Coast ports are more likely to continue their journey by rail while East Coast ports rely on trucks. The lack of a clear pattern in port usage speaks to the volatility this year, but Towers predicts more imports will be going into the East Coast.
In the carrier population, Vise says most of 2025 has been "kind of stable," with November showing a lower number of new carriers coming online. It could be an outlier, Vise says, but it could also reflect cost issues and regulation enforcement, particularly around foreign-born drivers, that are tightening the screws on new carriers.
That regulation enforcement comes in the form of English language proficiency violations as well as a new regulation on non-domiciled CDL holders. With the later regulation held up in courts, Vise says the English language regulations are the ones of concern. Still, he says, those only affect 25,000-27,000 drivers in a year.
"That's not a market-moving number," he says, adding any non-domiciled CDL rule enforcement would have more of an impact. "I'm personally skeptical that this is driven by the foreign driver environment."
