Two vendors had a disagreement. Your trucks went dark

Good morning.

Last Tuesday we counted an FMCSA list and found a device can stop being legal without anyone calling you.

This week the same thing happened commercially, in 48 hours, and the reason is still unsettled.

Highway vets carriers for brokers, reading ELD data with the carrier’s authorization. When the pipe narrowed it emailed its brokerage customers: Motive data now refreshes less often, Load Lock Alerts are unavailable for those carriers, and their freight is no longer covered by Highway’s Performance Guarantee — the backstop under which Highway puts its own capital behind its verification. That risk went back to the broker mid-week, by email.

On August 28 the two issued a joint statement. Access restored. “No action is required from carriers or brokers.”

The statement mentions no compensation, licensing, or money in either direction, and the contract has not been rewritten — the companies say they are “in discussions to update their existing agreement.”

The pipe is open. The reason it closed is open too.

INDICATIVE FIGURES. NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR PAID INTELLIGENCE.

Sources: FreightWaves, Overdrive, CDLLife, Transport Topics.

You are not a party to the agreement

One sentence from last week, repeated exactly once: the federal process that removes an ELD from the registry never mentions the motor carrier. Last week that was a regulatory finding. This week it is a commercial one, and it moved faster.

Motive and Highway have a contract. You are not in it. But the data is yours, and it moves because you authorized it — both companies said so, framing the resolution around “carrier authorization” and “carrier choice.” Your authorization was never in dispute. The price of honoring it was.

That is structural, not one company behaving badly. Your vetting platform depends on your ELD vendor. Your TMS depends on both. None of those dependencies appear in the contract you signed, or on any dashboard you can audit.

The same week, Descartes bought Tai for $100 million and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala took a majority stake in Arrive Logistics. Those are the slow version of the same event: the roadmap, the integrations and the support terms change owner, and nobody asks the fleet.

The fast version took 48 hours and ended with a joint statement that resolved the outage without resolving the question. Which means it can recur, on the same terms, tomorrow.

Highway — revisited, twelve weeks on

In Issue #4 we reviewed Highway and gave it WATCH. The reasons were enterprise pricing with no public number, and vendor lock-in.

The lock-in was real. It was just one layer up from where we pointed it.

We meant the broker’s lock-in to Highway. What actually bit was Highway’s dependency on Motive — and the customer who felt it was the broker, who had no contract with Motive at all. We named the right risk at the wrong layer, and it is worth saying so plainly.

Highway’s response is the most useful thing here: it integrates with more than 275 other ELD providers and offered discounted alternatives. That tells you what to ask any vetting, telematics or TMS vendor before you sign:

Highway’s guarantee lapsed for affected carriers and that exposure returned to the broker automatically. Highway emailed its customers the same week — that is the behaviour you want, and it is not the default.

Verdict stays WATCH. The product did what it should. The rating is about the stack it sits in.

Registry note: Overdrive reports MOTUS granting and suspending authority against stale data — two carrier suspensions with active insurance on file, one brokerage grant with no bond. Same failure family as the ELD registry gaps we counted last week: the list is the system of record, and the list is wrong.