When Ethan Young decided to start his own shipping company, he didn’t have a truck, just one cargo van. One year later, he’s generated enough business to own three large trucks and hire a team of six drivers. Business is booming, and he says it’s all because of a smartphone app.
“It makes the small guy easily compete with the big guy,” Young said about the app Cargomatic, which connects trucking companies with local shipments. “Business has gone from zero to 500 percent.”
Cargomatic is one of a number of start-ups using crowdsourcing and the so-called gig economy to make American trucking more convenient and profitable. And like many start-ups, it’s built around the smartphone.
Cargomatic uses an Uber-like model, letting individual truckers or fleets pick up local shipments that need to go out. For small, independent fleets—which the American Trucking Associations says make up 90 percent of all trucking—the app means more business, said Young, co-owner of Los Angeles-based Exclusive Industries LLC.
“They go out there, do the marketing, get the companies [to participate]. You just have to turn on your app and make sure you’re ready to rock and roll,” said Young.
For companies, it’s essentially a virtual freight or shipping broker that finds local trucks in the area with free space in their containers and tracks the delivery of your products.
“In local and regional shipping, there was fragmentation. Mom and pop companies know the pain of not being able to find trucks when you need them,” said Cargomatic CEO Jonathan Kessler.
Then there’s Drivewyze, which allows drivers to legally bypass weigh stations and inspection sites through agreements with 35 state commercial vehicle enforcement agencies.
As a truck approaches a weigh station or inspection site, Drivewyze runs the truck’s Department of Transportation (DOT) information through a federal database, which then produces a safety score. While there is random testing, drivers with a good history can keep driving the majority of the time.
“It’s kind of like a TSA pre-screening for trucks. By joining this program, in exchange for passing this DOT information electronically ahead of time, you have a good chance of skipping the line for the scale completely,” said Doug Johnson, Drivewyze’s director of marketing.
Passing a weigh station saves a trucker $9 or more in fuel, according to Johnson. By this calculation, if a trucker gets two bypasses a month, the $15-a-month app pays for itself.
Another company—PrePass—offers similar bypass services but is available only through a transponder-type device, not as a smartphone app.
Original Article- www.nbcnews.com, August 3, 2015 by Marguerite Ward