The Half-Empty Truck

Stand at the exit of any American distribution center for an hour and count the trucks. A large share of them are hauling air, at highway speed, with a professional driver, at about $2.26 a mile.¹

The measure for this is load factor: the share of a vehicle's capacity that is actually carrying freight. It is one of the most important numbers in the physical economy, and one of the least discussed outside of freight.

Two ways to waste a truck

A truck can waste capacity in two ways.

The first is driving with nothing in it. These are deadhead miles. The American Transportation Research Institute found that 16.7% of all US truck miles in 2024 were driven completely empty, exactly one mile in six.¹

Scale that to the country. US combination trucks drove about 192.5 billion miles in 2024.² At a 16.7% empty rate, that is roughly 32 billion empty miles. At ATRI's marginal operating cost of $2.26 a mile, those miles cost on the order of $70 billion a year, spent moving nothing.³

The second kind of waste is quieter and larger: a truck that is loaded but far from full. American Trucking Associations fleet data has shown average Class 8 payloads of about 29,000 pounds against rated capacities of 60,000 to 90,000 pounds.⁴ That puts the average loaded American truck at a load factor of roughly 32% to 48% by weight.

Put together, America runs a fleet that drives a sixth of its miles empty and most of the rest a third to half full. Every one of those miles still pays for diesel, tires, insurance and a driver. Carriers price the waste into their rates, shippers pass it into their prices, and consumers pay it at the shelf. Moving goods through the US economy cost $2.6 trillion in 2024, about 8.7% of GDP.⁵

The small-shipment penalty

A shipper with six pallets has two standard options, and neither is efficient.

LTL picks the freight up, takes it to a terminal, unloads it, sorts it, loads it onto another truck and often handles it again at a second terminal before delivery. Every touch adds time, cost and a chance of damage, and accessorial and reclassification charges tend to arrive after the fact.

A full truckload moves the freight directly, at the price of 26 pallet positions to carry six. The shipper pays for 20 positions of empty space.

Both options exist because the empty space on trucks already heading the same direction is invisible to the shipper at the moment it matters.

China raised its load factors

China faced the same problem at a larger scale and with a far more fragmented industry. Its long-haul trucking runs on millions of owner-operators, and for years the commonly cited estimate was that around 40% of truck trips ran empty. A study by China's Ministry of Transport used 45% as its baseline.⁶ Chinese heavy trucks averaged about 36,000 km a year against 90,000 km in the US, largely because drivers waited days between loads.⁷

China's response was to build a matching layer on the driver's phone, and it worked. Freight-matching platforms let shippers post loads and let nearby drivers claim them. By 2025, China had more than 3,000 digital freight platforms coordinating over 8 million trucks, and the time drivers spent waiting for a load fell from two to three days to eight to ten hours.⁸ The largest platform alone fulfilled 197 million orders in 2024.⁹

The results show up in the data. GPS records from 2021 put empty running at about 27% for Chinese tractor-trailers, well below the old 40% figure. Trucks matched through these platforms run at load factors approaching 90%.¹⁰ Across the whole economy, China's logistics costs fell from 18% of GDP in 2012 to 14.4% in 2023.⁸

China's work is far from finished. Platform matching still covers only about a fifth of its road freight, and its overall empty rate remains higher than America's.¹⁰ But the direction is clear, and so is the lesson: once spare capacity becomes visible and matchable, load factors rise quickly. China had less trucking data than America and built the matching layer anyway. America has something better than a phone app in nearly every truck cab, which is the subject of part four.

A third option

For most small shipments there is a better fit: put them in the open space of a truck already going the same way. We call it Oway Rideshare.

A shipper gives us four things: pickup ZIP, delivery ZIP, pallet count and total weight. Juno finds trucks on the network with open positions on a compatible route, checks that the pickup fits without breaking anyone's delivery window, and prices the move in seconds. The freight is loaded once and rides straight through.

Shippers move LTL and partials from 1 to 18 pallets at up to 50% below market, with an average pickup time of 30 minutes on active lanes. Carriers get paid for space they were going to haul anyway and have earned up to 30% more revenue per lane. Every match raises the load factor of a truck that was already on the road.

What it taught us

Filling empty trucks works. The harder question is why the space stays empty when the truck, the freight and the road are all right there. The answer is information that arrives too late to act on: where the space is, what it is worth and whether a stop fits the schedule.

That is a pricing problem and a coordination problem, the subjects of the next notes in this series.