Empty miles, also called deadhead miles, dead mileage, or non-revenue miles, are the kilometres a truck travels without carrying paying freight. Across Europe, this invisible inefficiency drains an estimated EUR 85 billion worth of vehicle-kilometres from the road freight industry every year, erodes carrier profitability by 15–35%, and pumps millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere for zero productive output. For an industry already operating on razor-thin margins, empty running is the single largest structural waste problem in European logistics.
What Are Empty Miles?
Empty miles occur any time a commercial vehicle moves from point A to point B without revenue-generating cargo on board. The concept is simple, but the variations matter.
Deadheading vs. Bobtailing
The two primary forms of empty running are often conflated, but they describe distinct situations:
- Deadheading is driving a tractor-trailer combination with an empty trailer attached. This is the most common form of empty miles. A carrier delivers a full load in Lyon, has no return freight booked, and drives the empty trailer 600 km back to Stuttgart. The truck burns fuel, accumulates wear, and occupies road capacity. All without generating a single euro of revenue.
- Bobtailing is driving a tractor unit without any trailer at all. This happens when a driver drops a trailer at a shipper’s facility and must reposition to pick up another trailer elsewhere. Bobtailing is mechanically harder on the vehicle because the drive axle carries less weight, reducing traction, and it is disproportionately dangerous. The IRU has flagged bobtailing as a contributing factor in braking-distance incidents on wet European roads.
Both deadheading and bobtailing produce empty miles, but they have different cost profiles, safety implications, and reduction strategies.
How Empty Miles Occur in Practice
Empty running is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of how freight networks function. A typical scenario:
- A carrier based in Kraków accepts a headhaul load to Rotterdam (the revenue-generating outbound leg).
- The load is delivered. The carrier now needs return freight, a backhaul, from the Netherlands back toward Poland.
- If no backhaul load is available at the right time, weight, equipment type, and price, the truck drives home empty.
This headhaul-backhaul dynamic is the engine of empty miles. Every load has a direction. When supply and demand do not balance in both directions on a lane, empty running fills the gap.
Other common triggers include:
- Repositioning moves: Relocating equipment to meet a contract commitment at a different origin point.
- Terminal returns: Returning to a home base or depot after a delivery, especially in private fleet operations.
- Failed pickups or refused loads: Arriving at a shipper’s facility only to find the load cancelled, short, or not ready.
- Dedicated fleet commitments: Contract carriers running dedicated routes where the return leg has no freight by design.
The Scale of Empty Running in Europe
Eurostat Data: The Continental Picture
According to Eurostat’s 2024 road freight transport statistics, 21.6% of all vehicle-kilometres driven by EU road freight vehicles are empty. That is not 21.6% of trucks sitting idle. It is 21.6% of every kilometre actually driven on European roads producing zero freight output.
The breakdown between domestic and international transport reveals a critical distinction:
| Segment | Empty Running Rate |
|---|---|
| National (domestic) transport | 25.8% |
| International (cross-border) transport | 12.6% |
| EU weighted average | 21.6% |
Domestic transport runs nearly empty at double the rate of international haulage. The reason is structural: international loads on major corridors (Rotterdam–Ruhr, Rhine–Rhône, Baltic–Adriatic) attract more competition, more freight exchange activity, and more backhaul opportunities. Domestic transport, especially in smaller or peripheral markets, operates in thinner networks with fewer matching options.
Country-by-Country Variation
The disparity across EU member states is enormous:
| Country | Empty Running Rate | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Cyprus | 43.7% | Island economy, extreme lane imbalance, limited return freight |
| Greece | ~38% | Geographic periphery, seasonal freight patterns |
| Ireland | ~34% | Island access, import-heavy imbalance |
| Latvia | ~30% | Small domestic market, transit-dependent |
| Belgium | ~6% | Dense freight network, major port hub, high exchange usage |
| Luxembourg | ~8% | Central location, high transit freight density |
| Netherlands | ~10% | Port of Rotterdam effect, mature digital freight market |
Belgium’s position at the bottom of the empty-running table is not accidental. The country sits at the intersection of Europe’s densest freight corridors, hosts the port of Antwerp-Bruges, and has among the highest adoption rates of freight exchange platforms in Europe. Geography and technology combine to compress empty miles.
Cyprus, at the other extreme, demonstrates what happens when geography works against you: an island economy with a structural import surplus has very little outbound freight to fill return legs.
Absolute Scale
EU total road freight reached approximately 1,869 billion tonne-kilometres (tkm) in 2024, according to Eurostat. When you overlay the 21.6% empty vehicle-kilometre rate across the EU truck fleet, the result is roughly 85 billion empty kilometres driven per year.
The average truck load factor in Europe, the percentage of a vehicle’s capacity actually utilized when it is carrying freight, hovers around 50%. This means that even when trucks are not running completely empty, they are, on average, only half full. The combination of empty running and partial loading means that European road freight operates at a systemic utilization level far below what the infrastructure, equipment, and driver hours could support.
Why Do Empty Miles Happen?
Six structural forces drive empty running in European freight.
1. Lane Imbalance and Trade Imbalance
Freight does not flow symmetrically. Germany exports manufactured goods to Southern and Eastern Europe but imports comparatively less by volume on the return leg. The Netherlands receives massive inbound container volumes through Rotterdam but outbound road freight from the Dutch interior does not match that volume or frequency. Spain exports perishables northward in winter but southbound demand from Northern Europe into Iberia is weaker.
These trade imbalances create persistent lane imbalances where demand for truck capacity is high in one direction and weak in the other. No amount of technology can create freight that does not exist. On structurally imbalanced lanes, some empty running is inevitable. The question is how much can be minimized.
2. Fragmented Carrier Networks
Europe’s road freight market is extraordinarily fragmented. More than 90% of European carriers operate fewer than 10 vehicles. Many are owner-operators with a single truck. These small carriers lack the network density, the customer relationships, and the market intelligence to consistently find backhaul freight. A two-truck operation based in Debrecen running loads to Munich cannot maintain a sales presence in Bavaria to source return freight. The result is predictable: drive home empty.
Contrast this with large asset-based carriers like Girteka Logistics, which operates thousands of trucks across Europe and can optimize internal freight flows across a dense network. Scale creates backhaul opportunities. Fragmentation destroys them.
3. Lack of Real-Time Visibility
A truck delivering in Marseille at 14:00 on Tuesday represents a backhaul opportunity, but only if the market knows it is there, knows its available capacity, knows its driver’s remaining hours, and knows its next commitment. Without real-time visibility and GPS tracking of available capacity, matching supply to demand is a manual, phone-and-email exercise that cannot operate at the speed freight markets require.
Many carriers still manage dispatch through spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and personal relationships. This works for regular, predictable lanes. It fails catastrophically for ad hoc backhaul matching where a 2-hour window of availability must be matched to a 2-hour window of demand 300 km away.
4. Regulatory and Operational Constraints
The EU Mobility Package (Regulation 2020/1055), while critical for driver welfare, imposes constraints that can increase empty miles:
- Cabotage rules limit a foreign carrier to three domestic operations within seven days after an international delivery, followed by a four-day cooling-off period. A Polish carrier delivering in France cannot simply run French domestic loads indefinitely to avoid empty repositioning.
- Driver hours regulations (Regulation 561/2006) mean a driver running low on available hours may not be able to wait for a backhaul load and must begin the return journey immediately, empty or not.
- Vehicle return rules require trucks to return to the operator’s establishment or the driver’s place of residence within eight weeks, creating mandatory repositioning that may not align with freight demand.
These regulations serve important social and competitive fairness objectives. But their side effect is additional empty kilometres.
5. Spot Market Dynamics and Information Asymmetry
The European freight spot market remains opaque relative to contract freight. A shipper with an urgent load in Bratislava may post it on a freight exchange, but the carrier with available capacity in Bratislava may not be monitoring that specific exchange at that specific moment. The largest European exchanges connect over 55,000 companies each with more than one million daily freight and vehicle offers, but not every carrier is on every platform, and not every load reaches the right truck at the right time.
Information asymmetry, where one party has information the other needs but cannot access, is the root cause of most avoidable empty miles.
6. Shipper Behavior and Loading Practices
Shippers contribute to empty running in ways they rarely acknowledge:
- Narrow delivery windows force carriers to arrive at specific times, making it impossible to sequence a backhaul pickup before the delivery appointment.
- Excessive dwell time at loading docks (averaging 2–3 hours at many European warehouses) consumes driver hours that could be used for backhaul operations. Structured dock scheduling systems can compress this to under 90 minutes, effectively freeing 1–2 additional driving hours per stop for backhaul matching.
- Refusal to allow co-loading means partial loads move on full trucks, and carriers cannot consolidate freight from multiple shippers.
- Last-minute cancellations leave carriers stranded with empty capacity and no time to source replacement freight.
The True Cost of Empty Miles
Per-Truck Economics
A standard European 40-tonne tractor-trailer operating at an average of 120,000 km per year with a 30% empty mile ratio:
| Cost Category | Annual Impact |
|---|---|
| Fuel (empty trucks burn 60–70% of loaded fuel consumption) | EUR 12,000–18,000 |
| Driver wages during non-revenue movement | EUR 8,000–12,000 |
| Tyre wear, maintenance, depreciation | EUR 4,000–7,000 |
| Toll charges (applicable regardless of load status) | EUR 3,000–6,000 |
| Insurance exposure (road risk without revenue offset) | EUR 1,000–2,000 |
| Total per truck per year | EUR 28,000–45,000 |
Note that fuel cost line: an empty truck does not consume zero fuel. An unloaded tractor-trailer still burns 60–70% of the fuel it would consume at full load. The engine, drivetrain, air resistance, and rolling resistance of a 15-tonne tractor and 7-tonne trailer do not disappear when the cargo bay is empty. You pay most of the fuel cost for none of the revenue.
Fleet-Level Impact
For a 10-truck fleet operating at 30% empty miles, the annual cost of empty running ranges from EUR 150,000 to EUR 200,000, money that flows directly out of the business with no return. For a small carrier operating on 3–5% net margins, this is the difference between viability and insolvency.
Scale that to a 100-truck fleet, and empty miles represent EUR 1.5–2 million in annual waste. At that level, even a 5-percentage-point reduction in empty running, from 30% to 25%, recovers EUR 250,000–330,000 per year.
Industry-Wide Economic Drain
The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) estimates that the EU road freight sector employs approximately 3.4 million people and operates around 6.2 million commercial vehicles. Based on per-truck cost data scaled across the EU’s approximately 6.2 million commercial vehicles (ACEA), empty running costs the European road freight industry an estimated EUR 100–150 billion annually in direct operational waste. This figure does not include the indirect costs: road congestion, infrastructure wear, accident risk, and environmental damage.
The Profitability Multiplier
Empty miles do not just reduce revenue, they destroy margin. Consider a carrier with:
- Revenue per loaded km: EUR 1.30
- Operating cost per km (loaded): EUR 1.20
- Operating cost per km (empty): EUR 0.85 (fuel, driver, tolls, wear)
- Margin per loaded km: EUR 0.10
Every empty kilometre does not just fail to generate the EUR 0.10 margin, it consumes EUR 0.85 in pure cost. The carrier must run 8.5 loaded kilometres at margin to offset the cost of one empty kilometre. This is why carriers operating at 30–35% empty miles report profit erosion of 15–35% of potential revenue.
How to Measure Empty Miles
You cannot reduce what you do not measure. These are the KPIs that matter.
Empty Mile Ratio (EMR)
The foundational metric:
EMR = (Empty Kilometres / Total Kilometres) × 100
A fleet that drives 1,200,000 total km in a year, of which 360,000 km are empty, has an EMR of 30%. The EU average is 21.6%. Best-in-class European operators achieve 8–12%.
Loaded Distance Ratio
The inverse of EMR, sometimes preferred because it frames the metric positively:
Loaded Distance Ratio = (Loaded Kilometres / Total Kilometres) × 100
Target: above 85% for well-optimized European operations.
Load Factor (Capacity Utilization)
EMR only captures whether the truck is empty or not. Load factor captures how full the truck is when it is carrying freight:
Load Factor = (Actual Payload Weight or Volume / Maximum Payload Weight or Volume) × 100
A truck rated for 24 tonnes carrying 12 tonnes has a 50% load factor by weight. The EU average load factor is approximately 50%, meaning the average European truck that is not running empty is still only half full.
The combination of EMR and load factor gives you the true picture. A fleet with 20% EMR and 50% load factor is utilizing only 40% of its theoretical capacity across all kilometres driven.
Revenue per Total Kilometre (RPTK)
This metric captures the financial impact directly:
RPTK = Total Revenue / Total Kilometres (loaded + empty)
Unlike revenue per loaded kilometre, which can look healthy while empty miles silently destroy margin, RPTK forces you to account for every kilometre your assets travel. If your RPTK is declining while your revenue per loaded km stays flat, empty miles are increasing.
Tracking and Reporting
Effective measurement requires:
- Telematics data: GPS-based actual kilometres, not estimated or planned kilometres. Every major telematics provider (Webfleet, Samsara, Trimble) can segment loaded vs. empty movement.
- TMS integration: Transport management systems should flag every empty repositioning move and calculate its cost automatically.
- Lane-level analysis: Aggregate EMR hides lane-specific problems. A fleet with 20% overall EMR might have 5% empty on its core lanes and 60% empty on secondary routes. The intervention strategy is completely different for each.
- Time-based trending: Monthly EMR tracking reveals seasonal patterns, customer-specific issues, and the impact of operational changes.
7 Strategies to Reduce Empty Miles
Each of these strategies has been validated by European carriers operating at scale. None requires futuristic technology, all are implementable today.
1. Systematic Backhaul Planning
The most direct attack on empty miles is treating backhaul sourcing as a core operational function, not an afterthought.
Practical steps:
- Assign dedicated backhaul coordination to dispatch staff or a specialized team, not as a secondary task for whoever has time.
- Build a backhaul database of regular shippers along your most common return corridors. Approach them directly with standing rate offers for consistent volume.
- Quote headhaul and backhaul as a round-trip when bidding contract freight. Bundling both legs into a single rate negotiation gives you control over the return.
- Establish relationships with brokers who specialize in your return lanes. A broker in Milan who knows you deliver there every Thursday can pre-source your Friday return load.
2. Freight Exchange and Digital Freight Matching Platforms
Europe’s freight exchanges are the fastest path to ad hoc backhaul freight. The major platforms and their scale:
| Platform | Network Size | Daily Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Largest DACH exchange | 55,000+ companies | 1,000,000+ offers |
| Largest CEE exchange | 44,000+ companies | 400,000+ offers |
| Largest Benelux exchange | 85,000+ users | 300,000+ offers |
| Largest Iberian exchange | 15,000+ companies | 150,000+ offers |
Beyond traditional exchanges, digital freight matching (DFM) platforms use algorithms to automatically match available capacity to open loads based on location, equipment, timing, and driver hours. The global DFM market was valued at USD 28.76 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 137.31 billion by 2034, growing at a 16.92% CAGR, according to market research from Precedence Research. This growth reflects the industry’s recognition that manual matching cannot solve empty miles at scale.
This difference matters: freight exchanges are searchable marketplaces where humans browse and negotiate. DFM platforms are algorithmic systems that proactively push matched opportunities to carriers in real time. Platforms like TrucksOnTheMap combine real-time GPS visibility with AI-powered matching to find the optimal backhaul for every truck in their network.
Modern DFM platforms go far beyond keyword search on a freight board. AI-powered load matching evaluates dozens of variables simultaneously:
- Truck current location and heading
- Driver remaining hours of service
- Vehicle equipment type and weight capacity
- Next scheduled commitment (time and location)
- Historical lane pricing and acceptance rates
- Shipper reliability scores and dwell time estimates
- Fuel cost along proposed route versus empty return route
The algorithm does not just find a load, it finds the optimal load that maximizes the carrier’s revenue per hour while minimizing total empty kilometres across the network. This is a combinatorial optimization problem that no human dispatcher can solve manually across thousands of trucks and loads.
3. Collaborative Logistics and Co-Loading
If you cannot fill your own truck, fill it with someone else’s freight.
Freight consolidation (or co-loading) combines partial loads from multiple shippers into a single full truckload. This requires:
- Shippers willing to share truck space (increasingly common as sustainability pressure grows).
- Compatible freight types (a chemical shipper and a food shipper cannot co-load, but two consumer goods shippers often can).
- Coordination platforms or 3PLs that manage the consolidation.
Pallet pooling through networks like CHEP and IFCO adds a reverse logistics dimension: standardized, reusable load carriers circulate through supply chains, creating inherent backhaul freight as empty pallets and containers flow back to origin.
Milk run logistics, where a single truck makes multiple pickup or delivery stops in a circuit rather than running point-to-point, compresses empty miles by eliminating the return leg entirely. The truck is always en route to the next stop.
4. Network Design and Hub-and-Spoke Optimization
Empty miles are often a network design problem, not a dispatch problem.
Hub-and-spoke networks concentrate freight at central cross-docking facilities where loads are broken down and reconsolidated for final delivery. This creates density: more freight flowing through fewer nodes means more matching opportunities at each hub.
Practical steps:
- Analyze your freight flows for natural clustering. If 40% of your deliveries are within 200 km of Frankfurt, establish a relay point there rather than running direct from origin.
- Use cross-docking to decouple inbound and outbound legs. A driver delivers to the hub, picks up a pre-staged outbound load, and continues, no empty repositioning.
- Evaluate intermodal transport (road plus rail) for trunk hauls over 500 km. Rail handles the long, often imbalanced corridor; trucks handle the first and last mile where density is higher and backhaul is easier to source.
5. Private Fleet and Dedicated Fleet Optimization
Private fleets (operated by shippers for their own freight) consistently show higher empty mile rates than for-hire carriers because they lack access to third-party backhaul freight. If you operate a private fleet:
- Open your empty capacity to the for-hire market. Many shippers resist this, but the economics are overwhelming. An empty return leg costs you EUR 0.85/km regardless. Even accepting backhaul freight at EUR 0.60/km recovers 70% of that cost.
- Partner with complementary shippers. A building materials supplier delivering southbound and a food manufacturer shipping northbound on the same corridor can swap backhaul freight systematically.
- Consider converting to a dedicated contract model with a for-hire carrier who can fill your trucks with third-party freight on return legs. XPO Connect and similar platforms facilitate this hybrid model.
6. Dynamic Pricing and Spot Market Participation
Rigid pricing accelerates empty miles. If your backhaul rate expectations are set at headhaul levels, you will drive home empty.
Practical steps:
- Implement directional pricing: accept lower rates on backhaul lanes where the alternative is empty running. A backhaul load at EUR 0.70/km on a lane where your empty cost is EUR 0.85/km saves you EUR 0.15/km. That is not a bad rate. It is a EUR 0.15 improvement over the alternative.
- Use rate intelligence tools to understand current spot market pricing on your backhaul lanes. Platforms offering price index data can reveal where rates are firming (worth waiting for) versus softening (take what is available now).
- Set time-based pricing triggers: if no backhaul is booked 24 hours before a delivery, lower the minimum acceptable rate. If nothing is booked 6 hours before, lower it again. Any revenue above marginal cost is better than zero.
7. Shipper Collaboration and Contract Innovation
Shippers have enormous power to reduce empty miles, and increasingly, they have the incentive, as ESG reporting requirements force them to account for Scope 3 transport emissions.
Practical steps:
- Flexible delivery windows: Expanding a 1-hour delivery slot to a 4-hour window gives carriers time to sequence a backhaul pickup before the delivery, dramatically increasing the probability of a loaded return.
- Dock scheduling systems reduce dwell time from hours to minutes, freeing driver hours for backhaul operations. Efficient appointment scheduling at warehouses and distribution centers is one of the highest-leverage interventions shippers can make.
- Continuous move contracts: Instead of awarding freight lane by lane, award multi-leg circuits where the carrier moves continuously between shipper facilities with minimal empty repositioning.
- Shared savings models: Offer carriers a bonus for achieving low empty mile ratios on your freight. If a carrier reduces empty miles on your lanes from 30% to 15%, split the fuel savings 50/50.
Beyond Matching: Predictive Technology
Predictive Backhaul Intelligence
The next frontier is not reactive matching (finding a load after delivery) but predictive backhaul intelligence: sourcing the return load before the outbound delivery even begins.
Machine learning models trained on historical freight data can predict with increasing accuracy:
- Which lanes will have available freight on which days
- What rates those loads will command
- Which shippers consistently have loads that match your equipment and schedule
- How weather, holidays, harvest seasons, and economic indicators shift freight patterns
With these predictions, a carrier can pre-book backhaul freight 48–72 hours in advance, converting uncertain spot market backhaul into reliable planned moves. AI delivers its highest value here: turning empty mile reduction from a reactive scramble into a proactive planning discipline.
Capacity Forecasting and Network Optimization
At the fleet level, technology enables carriers to stop thinking about individual trucks and start optimizing the network. Capacity forecasting tools analyze:
- Committed contract volumes and their expected empty mile profiles
- Spot market freight density along core corridors
- Seasonal demand shifts (produce season, holiday retail, construction cycles)
- Driver availability and hours-of-service projections
This data feeds network optimization engines that recommend which contracts to accept, which lanes to target, where to position trucks overnight, and when to accept lower-margin backhaul versus repositioning for a higher-margin load the next morning.
The Environmental Case for Reducing Empty Miles
The environmental cost of empty running compounds the financial damage.
The Carbon Math
An empty truck still burns 60–70% of the fuel it would burn fully loaded. This means that the approximately 85 billion empty kilometres driven annually in the EU produce roughly 50–60 million tonnes of CO2 that could be eliminated entirely if those trips carried freight, or better, did not happen at all.
To put that in perspective: 50 million tonnes of CO2 is roughly equivalent to the total annual emissions of a country the size of Croatia.
The European Environment Agency (EEA) identifies road freight as responsible for approximately 6% of total EU greenhouse gas emissions. Within that 6%, the share attributable to empty running and partial loading is disproportionately large. Eliminating empty miles would not solve freight emissions, but it would deliver one of the largest single reductions available without any change in vehicle technology.
European Green Deal Alignment
The European Green Deal targets a 90% reduction in transport-related greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Fit for 55 package sets an intermediate target of 55% reduction by 2030. These are binding commitments, and the transport sector, road freight in particular, is under intense scrutiny.
Empty mile reduction is the rare intervention that requires no new technology, no new infrastructure, and no regulatory change. It simply requires better utilization of assets that already exist. The European Commission’s Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy explicitly identifies improved logistics efficiency and load factor optimization as priority pathways.
ESG Reporting and Scope 3 Emissions
The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which began phased implementation in 2024, requires large companies to report Scope 3 emissions, including upstream and downstream transportation. For shippers, this means the empty miles their carriers run are now a reportable metric.
This regulatory pressure is already changing behavior:
- Shippers are asking carriers for empty mile ratios as part of tender qualification.
- 3PLs are building empty mile tracking into their ESG dashboards.
- Carriers with low empty mile ratios are winning contracts over cheaper competitors with higher environmental footprints.
The carriers and platforms that can document and prove low empty running rates have a growing competitive advantage that compounds as ESG requirements tighten.
Empty Miles FAQ
What is the difference between empty miles and deadhead miles?
They are the same thing. “Empty miles” is the more common term in European logistics, while “deadhead miles” is frequently used in North American markets. Both refer to kilometres driven without revenue-generating freight. Related synonyms include dead mileage, empty running, and non-revenue miles. Bobtailing, driving a tractor without a trailer, is a specific subset of empty miles.
What is the average empty mile rate in Europe?
According to Eurostat 2024 data, the EU-wide average is 21.6% of vehicle-kilometres. This breaks down to 25.8% for national (domestic) transport and 12.6% for international (cross-border) transport. Rates vary dramatically by country, from approximately 6% in Belgium to 43.7% in Cyprus.
How much do empty miles cost a trucking company?
For a 10-truck European fleet operating at a 30% empty mile ratio, the annual cost of empty running ranges from EUR 150,000 to EUR 200,000 in direct expenses (fuel, driver wages, tolls, maintenance). The indirect cost, lost revenue opportunity, is even higher. Industry analyses suggest empty miles erode 15–35% of a carrier’s potential revenue.
Do empty trucks use less fuel than loaded trucks?
Yes, but far less than most people assume. An empty truck burns approximately 60–70% of the fuel consumed by the same truck at full load. The vehicle’s own weight, aerodynamic drag, and drivetrain friction account for the majority of fuel consumption. Payload adds incremental fuel cost, but removing the payload does not proportionally reduce consumption.
How can a small carrier reduce empty miles?
Focus on three actions: (1) register on multiple freight exchanges ; (2) build direct relationships with 5–10 shippers along your most common return corridors; (3) adopt flexible backhaul pricing, any load above marginal cost beats driving empty.
Will autonomous trucks solve the empty miles problem?
Not directly. Autonomous trucks eliminate driver cost and hours-of-service constraints, which removes some operational barriers to backhaul matching (a driverless truck can wait for a load without burning driver hours). However, the fundamental problem, lane imbalance and information asymmetry, remains. Autonomous trucks will still need intelligent matching platforms and network optimization to avoid running empty. The technology that solves empty miles is not in the truck; it is in the software that coordinates the freight network.
Empty miles are the freight industry’s most expensive inefficiency, not because they are hard to understand, but because they are hard to coordinate away. The carriers, shippers, and platforms that invest in visibility, intelligent matching, and collaborative logistics will capture the margin that empty running currently destroys. At approximately EUR 100–150 billion in annual waste across Europe, the opportunity is too large to leave on the road.
