Trucking moves roughly seventy percent of America's freight by tonnage, and almost nobody covers it as a beat. The trades do good work, but they cover the industry the way a business publication covers a sector. Very few people write about it the way you would write about a police department or a courthouse, which is what an industry with 500,000 registered carriers, a federal regulator, a national safety database, and a persistent fraud problem actually requires.

I spent twenty-five years inside this business before I wrote about it. I've held a Class A CDL and driven the truck. I've brokered freight. I've run a fleet. I've written the safety program, sat through the compliance review, reconstructed the crash, and testified about it under oath for both plaintiffs and defendants. When I read a story about detention time or a nuclear verdict or a chameleon carrier, I'm reading it against something I did.

That's the whole editorial premise. Not access, not exclusives. Just somebody who knows what the paperwork means.

The wire. Headlines from more than a hundred sources, refreshed every ten minutes and sorted into desks: crashes and enforcement, fraud and investigations, regulation and policy, drivers and labor, freight markets, supply chain, fuel, insurance and legal. Every headline links to the original outlet. We don't reproduce other people's reporting, and we don't run their stories behind our own byline. If they wrote it, you go read it there.

The international desk. DVSA enforcement and traffic commissioner decisions from the United Kingdom, cabotage and Mobility Package changes from the European Union, NHVR and chain of responsibility matters from Australia, NZTA from New Zealand. The same problems show up in every jurisdiction that runs trucks, and the regulators borrow from each other more than the industry realizes.

Original reporting. Investigations that take weeks. The ghost fleet network, the ELD fraud registry, the chameleon carrier operations that shed one USDOT number and open under another. This work runs here and on Talking Wreckless.

Compass. How to run a better fleet, built around risk rather than compliance theater. What your loss runs are telling you that your safety scores aren't, and what a plaintiff's attorney sees when they pull your record.

Twenty-five years in commercial transportation as a CDL-A driver, freight broker, fleet executive, compliance director, and crash reconstructionist.

Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Trucking. Former contributing writer at FreightWaves and FWs The Playbook. Host on SiriusXM Road Dog Trucking, channel 146. Featured contributor to CBS 60 Minutes on chameleon carrier fraud.

Member of the White House Correspondents' Association, the National Press Club, the International Federation of Journalists, and the National Writers Union.

Founder and Chief Intelligence Officer of Tea Technologies, Inc.; Vice President of Compliance at TruckSafe Consulting. Vice Chair of the National Defense Transportation Association's Ad Hoc Special Task Force on Freight Resilience and Contested Logistics.

Based in Yorktown, Virginia.

Full CV · robcarpenter.co · Book a meeting

Attribution. Every factual claim traces to a named source: an agency release, a court document, a Federal Register notice, a named person. When we can't name a source, we say why.

Primary documents. We work from the record. Indictments, dockets, MCS-150 filings, inspection data, Federal Register notices. When a story rests on a court filing, we name the case and the docket number so you can pull it yourself.

Charged is not convicted. Anyone charged and not convicted gets that said plainly, and every allegation is attributed to the charging document or the prosecutor. A carrier appearing in federal registration data alongside another carrier is a lead, not a finding, and we write it that way.

Right of reply. Anyone named in an investigation gets contacted before publication and gets their response in the piece. If they decline or don't respond, we say so.

No pay-to-kill and no pay-to-run. A story doesn't appear because someone paid for it, and it doesn't disappear because someone paid us not to run it. See the advertising section below.

We correct errors. Quickly, visibly, and without pretending they didn't happen.

We append a correction to the story with the date and what changed. A correction to a material fact is noted at the top of the piece, not buried at the bottom. We do not silently edit a published story to fix a factual error.

If we got something wrong, email robreportnews@pm.me. Tell us what's wrong and how you know. You do not need to be the subject of the story to report an error.

Full disclosure, up front, because the alternative is somebody discovering it.

The Rob Report is published by Tea Technologies, Inc., a Delaware corporation. Tea Technologies also operates THE TEA Highway Intelligence Platform and related products including CarrierVerifi, DriverVerifi, LoadVerifi, HazmatVerifi and MotusVerifi, which sell carrier vetting and compliance data to the trucking industry. Rob Carpenter is the founder and holds an equity stake.

He is also Vice President of Compliance at TruckSafe Consulting, and he works as a retained expert witness in commercial motor vehicle litigation for plaintiff and defense counsel.

That means the person writing about carrier safety also sells carrier safety data, advises carriers, and testifies about carriers in court. Those are real conflicts. Here is how we handle them:

• When a story touches a company that is a TEA customer, a TruckSafe client, or a party in a matter where Rob is retained, we disclose that relationship in the story itself.
• Rob does not report on active litigation in which he is a retained expert.
• TEA platform data used in a story is labeled as such, and it comes from public federal sources you can verify independently.
• Nothing published here is a sales document for the platform, and a company does not receive better or worse coverage based on whether it is a customer.

Advertising. We have not accepted paid advertising. When we do, it will not be all comers. We will not lend this masthead to a product or service we would warn a friend away from, at any price. A sponsor does not buy protection: if a company advertising here becomes news, we report it the way we would report it about anyone else. Contributed content is not pulled or softened because of who is paying. Any sponsored placement will be labeled as sponsored, clearly and in the same font size as everything else on the page.

Currently, the only advertisements on this site promote other Tea Technologies products. Those are labeled.

We're looking for contributors, and we mean people who work in this industry, not people who write about industries.

From the truck. From the insurance office. From the claims desk, dispatch, the safety department, the shop, the broker's floor, the DOT scale. You do not need a byline history. You need to know something firsthand and be willing to put your name on it.

Contributors are credited, keep their own voice, and are edited for accuracy and clarity rather than for agreement.

Pitch to robreportnews@pm.me. Two paragraphs on what you want to write and how you know it.

General and news tips, Corrections, Contributors, Advertising: robreportnews@pm.me

Tea Technologies, Inc., Yorktown, Virginia

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