4 American Trucking Companies That Didn't Survive the Freight Recession

The U.S. freight market peaked during 2021–2022, driven by pandemic demand. When consumer spending returned to normal, spot rates dropped sharply—but costs like fuel, insurance, and debt stayed high.

By November 2025, trucking companies were shutting down at a record pace, even worse than past recessions. Around 88,000 trucking authorities were revoked in 2023, with tens of thousands more closures in 2024 and 2025.

Here are the top ones that did not survive the freight recession.

Yellow Corp. was not a victim of the freight recession alone. It was a carrier that had been slowly failing for decades, propped up by union concessions, government loans, and the goodwill of an industry that didn't want to watch a nearly century-old institution die. When the freight recession arrived, it simply accelerated an ending that was already written.

The problems traced back to a catastrophic acquisition strategy in the early 2000s, when Yellow absorbed Roadway and USF in deals that loaded the company with debt it could never fully service.

By the first quarter of 2023 — the year it would file for bankruptcy — Yellow was carrying approximately $1.47 billion in total debt against assets of just $806 million. It had come close to collapsing four previous times since the Great Recession, each time surviving through emergency measures that delayed but did not solve the underlying insolvency.

The pandemic almost saved it. Yellow received a $700 million bailout from the US Treasury in 2020, making the federal government one of its largest shareholders. The pandemic freight boom bought time. But by 2022, rates were collapsing and Yellow was attempting a major network overhaul — rebranding as "One Yellow," consolidating four subsidiaries, selling 28 terminals to pay down debt, and changing union work rules. The Teamsters, representing 22,000 of Yellow's workers, blocked those changes for nine months. Yellow sued the union for $137 million. The union blamed decades of mismanagement.

On July 30, 2023, Yellow completed its last delivery. On August 6, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with the intent to liquidate, not reorganize. Thirty thousand people — including 22,000 Teamsters members who had worked for the company for decades — were out of work. Yellow's 500-plus shipping terminals were sold off to competitors, including XPO, Estes Express, and Old Dominion. The $700 million federal loan was effectively lost.

Convoy's story is different from Yellow's in almost every way — younger company, technology-first model, venture capital funding, star-studded investor list including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Marc Benioff, and Bono. The failure is different too: not the slow collapse of a debt-burdened legacy carrier, but the sudden implosion of a startup that bet its entire future on a freight market that stopped cooperating.

Founded in Seattle in 2015, Convoy built a digital platform that connected shippers directly with small trucking companies and owner-operators, promising to eliminate the inefficiency and margin extraction of traditional freight brokers through automation and technology.

The model worked brilliantly during the pandemic boom. At its peak, Convoy connected 80,000 carriers, employed 1,500 people, generated $106.8 million in revenue in 2022, and was valued at $3.8 billion following a $260 million funding round — one of the most valuable logistics startups in the world.

Then the market turned. By late 2022, Convoy was burning through $10 million per month. Revenue was cratering — falling to roughly half its 2022 numbers within a year. The structural problem was the freight recession itself: with abundant truck capacity available, shippers could bypass digital brokerages entirely and negotiate directly with large carriers at attractive rates. Convoy's model depended on capacity being scarce enough that its technology added real value; in an oversupplied market, it just added cost.

CEO Dan Lewis spent months searching for a buyer. The company that seemed most likely to acquire Convoy — a "logical strategic acquirer," as Lewis described it without naming — was itself being crushed by the same market conditions and couldn't complete a deal.

On October 18, 2023, Lewis sent a memo to staff. "We hoped this day would never come," it began. The core business was shut down.

Celadon Group's collapse in December 2019 predates the Great Freight Recession by nearly three years, but it belongs on this list for a reason: it is the cautionary prologue. Celadon was the 11th-largest US trucking company by revenue at the time of its collapse — operating 3,300 tractors, 10,000 trailers, and employing roughly 4,000 people.

Its failure was the largest trucking bankruptcy of 2019, described by one analyst as "certainly one of the largest in history." What made it different from every other carrier on this list was its cause: not market conditions, not rates, not the freight recession. Accounting fraud.

Federal investigators found that Celadon executives had engaged in a scheme to overvalue the company's truck assets by tens of millions of dollars — inflating valuations through related-party transactions designed to make the company's balance sheet look healthier than it was.

Two former executives were charged and eventually convicted of securities fraud. The CEO at the time of the collapse, Paul Svindland, had inherited the fraud rather than created it, and worked to unwind the damage — but the disclosure of the accounting irregularities destroyed the company's ability to refinance its debt or attract the capital it needed to survive.

Tony's Express is the smallest company on this list by any measurable metric. It is also, in some ways, the most representative — because its story is the story of the thousands of family-owned regional carriers that didn't make headlines when they closed, but whose collective disappearance reshaped the freight landscape just as profoundly as any individual bankruptcy.

The company was founded in 1954 by a father and son — Anthony "Tony" Raluy and George Raluy — and ran regional freight operations in California for seventy years. In May 2023, near the start of the recession's worst phase, John H. Ohle bought the company from the founding family, inheriting an operation with genuine history and regional relationships. What he also inherited was a market environment that would prove impossible to survive.

"The current market just didn't support our ability to operate and be a profitable company," Ohle told FreightWaves a few days after the closure. "The cost of fuel in California made it very difficult." The California fuel premium — diesel prices in California consistently run $0.50 to $1.00 per gallon above national averages due to state fuel taxes and emissions regulations — was a structural cost disadvantage that compressed margins that were already razor-thin under recession pricing.

Ohle had found two potential buyers willing to either partner or take over the company, and negotiations proceeded to what appeared to be a final stage. Both deals fell apart "at the very end" — a last-minute collapse that Ohle described as making the filing a "last-minute decision." Tony's Express filed for Chapter 11 in 2024. The company that had moved freight in California since Dwight Eisenhower was president was gone.