ATRI’s new Critical Issues in the Trucking Industry – 2025 report is out, and the headline is clear: fleets are trying to survive in a weak freight market while staring down a tougher legal and regulatory environment than they’ve seen in years. This report provides a ranked view of what more than 4,200 industry stakeholders say matters most right now, from drivers and owner-operators to carrier executives and suppliers. For the third year in a row, the Economy sits at the top of the list as the number-one industry issue. This comes as no surprise. Behind it, though, the rest of the top ten has shifted in ways that tell a more interesting story: lawsuit pressures rising, electric-truck anxiety morphing into diesel-emissions concerns, and a sharper split between what drivers and carriers say is really hurting them.
2024 vs 2025 at a Glance
Here’s the high-level shift in ATRI’s Top 10 from 2024 to 2025:
| Rank | 2024 Top Issues | 2025 Top Issues
|
| 1 | Economy | Economy |
| 2 | Truck Parking | Lawsuit Abuse Reform |
| 3 | Lawsuit Abuse Reform | Insurance Cost / Availability |
| 4 | Insurance Cost / Availability | Truck Parking |
| 5 | Driver Compensation | Driver Compensation |
| 6 | Battery Electric Vehicles (ZEV) | CSA |
| 7 | CSA | English Language Proficiency for Drivers |
| 8 | Detention / Delay at Customer Facilities | Diesel Emissions Regulations |
| 9 | Driver Shortage | Driver Training Standards |
| 10 | Driver Distraction | Artificial Intelligence in Trucking |
A few key storylines in this table:
- Fuel prices are gone from the Top 10. As recently as 2022, fuel prices were the number-one concern. By 2023 they were still #3; now they’re off the list entirely. That doesn’t mean diesel is cheap. It means other issues feel more existential.
- Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) fell from #6 to #23. ATRI ties this directly to the Trump administration’s move to revoke California’s electric-vehicle mandates earlier this year, which effectively took immediate BEV compliance risk off the table for many fleets.
- New compliance and technology issues have moved in. English Language Proficiency for drivers, Diesel Emissions Regulations, Driver Training Standards, and AI in trucking are all now in the Top 10.
Taken together, 2025 looks less like an “energy transition” year and more like a defensive year: protecting fragile margins, managing lawsuit exposure, and trying to keep enough qualified drivers in the seat while the rules change around them.
The Cost Picture: Survival Math in a Soft Freight Market
The Economy remains the top concern across all respondents. And the numbers behind that ranking are brutal.
ATRI’s latest Operational Costs of Trucking work shows total cost per mile at about $2.26–$2.27 in recent years, a record high and roughly 62 cents per mile more than 2020. Non-fuel operating costs alone are running around $1.78 per mile, driven by equipment, maintenance, insurance, and driver compensation. At the same time, ATRI notes that many truckload carriers are operating with margins under 2 percent, and some large truckload fleets have reported negative operating margins in 2024–2025. In plain English: plenty of carriers are running hard for almost no return.
On the labor side, driver total compensation has risen roughly 2.4 percent year-over-year, while inflation has been closer to 2.9 percent, effectively a small pay cut in real terms. For drivers, that’s not “record pay.” It’s “my costs went up faster than my paycheck.”
No surprise, then, that Driver Compensation is still the number-one issue for drivers and #5 overall, while the Economy is the number-one concern for motor carriers.
This is the core split of 2025: carriers obsess over cost-per-mile and survival; drivers focus on whether they can actually get ahead.
Key takeaway
Instead of the generic “track your per-mile costs,” treat ATRI’s averages as a benchmark and put hard guardrails around them.
- Audit your cost per mile directly against ATRI’s averages. If your all-in CPM is more than 5 percent above the ~$2.26 baseline for your segment, assume you are bleeding cash somewhere. Start with the line items ATRI flags as the fastest-rising: insurance, maintenance, and equipment.
- Tie cost conversations back to driver experience. When compensation lags inflation, drivers will treat every change in mileage, detention pay, or routing as a pay cut. If your OR is hovering above 98, small improvements in dwell time, route quality, and paid miles can matter as much as a few extra cents per mile.
Courts and Coverage: Lawsuit abuse and insurance climb the rankings
The two biggest climbers on the 2025 list are Lawsuit Abuse Reform (#2) and Insurance Cost / Availability (#3).
This reflects years of “nuclear verdicts” and social-inflation pressure, where juries award eight- and nine-figure sums for crashes that often hinge more on perceived carrier culture than on the specific facts of an incident. Even with recent wins for carriers, the fear is still there. For risk managers, the lesson isn’t “we’re safe now.” It’s that a single case can swing from zero to nine figures and back again over a decade. Insurers price that volatility into every renewal.
That’s why insurance cost and availability sit immediately behind lawsuit abuse on ATRI’s list.
Key takeaway
Think less about “fighting lawsuits” and more about documenting reality so you can show a jury what actually happened and how your safety system works.
- Build a crash-package discipline. For every DOT-recordable crash, ask a simple question: if this case went to trial, could we reconstruct the facts quickly with telematics, dashcam video, driver coaching records, and maintenance logs? If the answer is no, you’re not ready.
- Align claims, safety, and operations. Many fleets still treat litigation as something the insurance company “handles.” In a nuclear verdict era, your internal teams need a shared playbook for data retention, driver support, and media/legal communication.
You can’t fully control jury behavior. You can control how prepared you are when your company name is on the docket.
Drivers vs carriers: two different worlds on the same highway
ATRI’s driver vs motor-carrier split is where the real tension shows up.
Drivers’ top concerns (2025):
- Driver Compensation
- Truck Parking
- English Language Proficiency for Drivers
- Broker Issues
- Detention / Delay at Customer Facilities
- Artificial Intelligence in Trucking
- Driver Training Standards
- Autonomous Trucks
- ELD Mandate
- Diesel Emissions Regulations
Motor carriers’ top concerns (2025):
- Economy
- Lawsuit Abuse Reform
- Insurance Cost / Availability
- CSA
- Driver Shortage
- Driver Retention
- Driver Distraction
- Diesel Emissions Regulations
- Truck Parking
- Broker Issues
Same industry, completely different pain points.
Carriers are looking at macro risk: freight demand, legal exposure, insurance, CSA scores, and long-term capacity. Drivers are focused on friction: getting paid fairly for their time, finding a safe place to park, navigating new English tests, and dealing with brokers.
That disconnect is the backdrop for almost every people problem your fleet is wrestling with.
Daily friction: parking, detention, and English proficiency
Truck Parking fell from #2 overall in 2024 to #4 in 2025, but it is still the number-two concern for drivers and remains in motor carriers’ Top 10. Add detention to that picture. ATRI’s detention research shows drivers lost 135.9 million hours at customer facilities in 2023, representing roughly $11.5 billion in lost revenue across the for-hire sector.
Zoom out even further: ATRI’s congestion work estimates that truck congestion ate up 1.2 billion hours of delay in 2022, costing the industry about $108.8 billion in wasted time and fuel and the equivalent of more than 435,000 drivers sitting idle for a year.
From the driver’s seat, “economy” means sitting at a dock for hours, then circling for parking with an almost-expired HOS clock.
English Language Proficiency: compliance risk meets labor reality
A new entry in the Top 10 is English Language Proficiency (ELP) for drivers, ranked #7 overall and #3 for drivers.
This is not a theoretical debate about language. It’s tied to concrete enforcement moves: ATRI cites new federal actions and a revised English exam that reportedly sidelined around 6,000 drivers in 2025 alone. For a workforce that includes many immigrant drivers and small carriers, ELP enforcement hits directly at capacity. For carriers, it’s a compliance and liability problem. For drivers, it feels like the rules changed overnight.
Key takeaway
Treat these issues as joint problems, not “driver complaints.”
- Score your shippers on detention and parking. Use ELD and TMS data to rank your top 20 customers by average dwell time, unpaid detention, and on-site parking availability. If you’re invoicing detention less than ~75 percent of the time and collecting less than ~55 percent of what you bill, you’re subsidizing their inefficiency.
- Bring drivers into your ELP and training response. Rather than quietly pulling drivers from lanes, invest in targeted language and training support for those who want to stay. Make it clear you’re trying to keep compliant drivers in the seat, not just trimming risk.
Addressing parking, detention, and ELP visibly and concretely does more to improve retention than another generic bonus program.
Diesel emissions and the EPA 2027 anxiety
Another newcomer to the Top 10 is Diesel Emissions Regulations (#8 overall).
ATRI makes the link explicit: a new heavy-duty NOx emissions rule is scheduled to take effect for model-year 2027 trucks. It is expected to substantially increase the cost of new diesel trucks, on top of post-COVID supply chain impacts that have already added more than 20 percent to the price of a new Class 8 truck. At the same time, battery electric trucks have slipped out of the Top 10, falling from #6 in 2024 to #23 this year, largely because the federal government moved to revoke California’s EV mandates.
The pressure point has shifted from “Will we be forced to buy BEVs?” to “What will 2027 diesel hardware and warranties do to our capex and uptime?”
Industry analysis outside ATRI echoes this: fleets are weighing whether to pre-buy EPA-2027-spec trucks, delay purchases, or stretch asset life while regulations and politics keep shifting.
Key takeaway
Treat 2027 as a capital-planning test, not just a regulatory headache.
- Map your replacement curve through 2028. Overlay your current tractor age profile with different 2026–2028 purchase scenarios: normal replacement, modest pre-buy, or extended life. Look at how each affects cash, maintenance, and compliance risk.
- Quantify the per-truck cost delta. Use vendor and industry estimates for EPA-2027 hardware to model how much extra capex you’re facing per unit. Then connect that directly back to your cost-per-mile benchmark work.
Your board and your lenders don’t want hand-waving about emissions. They want numbers and a plan.
AI, CSA, and the “quiet” technology shift
Two technology-related issues round out the 2025 Top 10: CSA (#6) and Artificial Intelligence in Trucking (#10).
Drivers rank AI in trucking as their #6 concern, while motor carriers list Driver Distraction, Driver Retention, and CSA above AI. The worry on the driver side is simple: “Is this going to replace me or make my life worse?” On the carrier side, AI is mostly showing up as analytics and automation layered on top of existing systems: pulling insights from ELD data, automating safety reviews, predicting maintenance, and supporting back-office workflows.
Key takeaway
The quickest way to lower anxiety is to point AI at problems drivers already hate.
For example:
- Use AI-driven analytics to identify chronic detention locations from ELD data and share the plan to fix them.
- Use AI tools to pre-assemble “crash packages” from telematics, camera, and maintenance systems, so drivers aren’t stuck re-telling the same story five times after an incident.
If drivers see AI used to reduce pointless friction, their view of it will shift from seeing it as a “threat” to seeing it as a “tool.”
The silent killers: what didn’t make the Top 10
ATRI also tracks issues ranked 11–13, the ones that just miss the Top 10 cut: Driver Distraction (#11), Driver Shortage (#12), and Broker Issues (#13).
All three matter more than their ranking suggests:
- Driver Distraction is back on the radar, with NHTSA reporting over 3,300 people killed in distraction-affected crashes in 2022, including hundreds in cell-phone-related incidents.
- Driver Shortage has dropped out of the Top 10 for the first time in the survey’s 21-year history, mainly because the freight recession has loosened capacity. But motor carriers still rank driver shortage and retention as their #5 and #6 concerns.
- Broker Issues are rising fast in the driver rankings (now #4) and include fraud, double-brokering, and disputes over liability. ATRI’s cargo theft work tags double-brokering as a primary tool in strategic theft schemes.
Add in rising cyber and fraud risk—from identity theft on load boards to factoring scams and phishing around fuel cards—and you get a cluster of problems that may not top a survey, but can quietly destroy a P&L or a reputation. These are the “silent killers”: not always in the Top 10, but fully capable of shutting down a small carrier or driving a mid-sized fleet into a sale.
So what does 2025 really mean for trucking companies?
Looking across ATRI’s 2025 list and the supporting cost and congestion data, a key theme emerges:
2025 was the year of survival math.
Margins are razor-thin. Operating costs are near record highs. Congestion and detention are chewing through billions of dollars of productivity. The legal environment is volatile. Regulations for 2027 and beyond are in flux. Drivers feel squeezed by pay, time, parking, and new rules.
If you’re leading a fleet and want practical steps you can apply inside your own operations, here are three concrete moves that line up with ATRI’s findings:
- Benchmark and fix one major cost line: Take ATRI’s ~$2.26–$2.27 per-mile cost benchmark and compare it to your own. If you’re out of line by more than 5 percent, pick one big lever—insurance, maintenance, or equipment—and attack it with data. Renegotiate, re-shop, or rethink specs, but don’t accept “that’s just what it costs now” as the answer.
- Stop guessing about detention and parking: This week, pull a 12-month detention and dwell report for your top five shippers. Look at billed versus collected detention, average dwell, and how often drivers have to leave to find parking. If you aren’t collecting fees on at least 90 percent of valid detention events, you’re subsidizing someone else’s inefficiency. Use that data to change contracts or freight mix, not just to complain.
- Run a crash-readiness drill: Choose one serious crash from the last year and pretend it’s about to go to trial. Can you assemble dashcam, telematics, driver qualification, training, and maintenance records quickly and coherently? If not, fix that gap before a plaintiff’s attorney forces you to do it under a spotlight.
The 2025 ATRI report is ultimately a tool for validation, providing the industry’s latest data to stress-test your own assumptions and sharpen your operational focus.
If there is one idea to carry forward from the ATRI report, it’s this: treat every issue on the list as something you can measure and work with, not just something to react to.
Ready to build your 2026 roadmap? Book a session today and we’ll help you build a focused, data-driven strategy for the year ahead.