Ask anyone who has actually run a car-hauling operation what the hardest part of the job is, and they will rarely say the driving. The driving is the part we signed up for. The hard part is everything that happens before the wheels turn — the filings, the bonds, the compliance checks, the contracts, and the ever-growing stack of rules that decide whether you are even allowed to move a vehicle from one driveway to another.
At AutoShippingNearMe, we have spent close to two decades in this industry — on the carrier side and the broker side both. So when the conversation turns to regulation, we are not talking about it from a textbook. We are talking about it from the loading ramp. And the honest truth is this: the moments when the federal government stepped back are the moments the industry opened up for the little guy. The moments it stepped in are usually the moments the paperwork started eating the day.
This is not an anti-rules rant. Some regulation protects everyone — the carrier, the customer, and the reputable operators who play it straight. But it is worth understanding how we got here, because the story of the car carrier is, at its heart, a story about how much room the government gives a small operator to actually operate.
The forty-five years nobody talks about
Most people have no idea that for nearly half a century, you essentially needed the government’s permission to run a truck.
Starting with the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, interstate trucking fell under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). To operate, a carrier needed a “certificate of public convenience and necessity” — a government blessing that was famously difficult to obtain, especially for newer companies. Rates had to be filed with the ICC weeks before they took effect, and competitors could comb through those filings and challenge them. Entry into the business was tightly controlled. If you wanted to haul a certain kind of freight, on a certain route, in a certain region, you needed authority for exactly that — and the incumbents had every incentive to keep you out.
The result was a protected, comfortable industry for those already inside it, and a locked door for nearly everyone else. Salaries were high, profits were steady, and the cost of that coziness was passed straight through to the shipper and, ultimately, the consumer.
That world ended on July 1, 1980, when President Jimmy Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 into law. In his own words at the signing, the heart of the law was a call for “prompt and sweeping change of the regulations that have insulated the trucking industry from competition since 1935.”
What deregulation actually did
The 1980 Act did not eliminate all oversight — it was a partial deregulation, and safety rules stayed firmly in place. But economically, it changed everything. It removed most federal entry controls, loosened the rules on which goods a truck could carry and where, and gave individual carriers real freedom to set their own rates in response to what customers actually wanted.
The effect on the number of operators was dramatic. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of trucking companies in the United States roughly doubled. The barrier that had kept small operators out for forty-five years came down, and a flood of new entrants — many of them owner-operators rather than big fleets — poured in. Open-market entry more than doubled the share of for-hire truckers who owned their own trucks instead of drawing a company paycheck.
For the customer, the savings were enormous. By 1985, deregulation was saving shippers billions of dollars a year through lower rates and faster service. Over the following decades, real operating costs per mile fell sharply. The modern reality that you can buy a car online three states away and have it delivered to your door for a reasonable price simply did not exist in the regulated era — and it exists now in large part because that 1980 door swung open.
Here is where the honest part comes in, because credibility matters more than cheerleading: deregulation had real costs too. As the market flooded with new entrants, rates got competitive fast, and thousands of established carriers that could not adapt went under in the years that followed. Union membership fell, and average driver earnings declined over the following decades as the labor market opened up. Anyone who tells you deregulation was pure upside is selling something.
But for the small operator — the independent who wanted a shot at building a business without begging a federal commission for permission — 1980 was the year the industry became possible. That is the throughline we care about, because we live on that end of the business.
The irony of 2026: the paperwork came back through a different door
Here is the frustration that anyone running a carrier operation today feels in their bones. The economic entry barriers came down in 1980 — but the compliance burden has been climbing back up ever since, just wearing different clothes. It is no longer a certificate of public convenience and necessity. Now it is a thickening file of federal rules, bond requirements, registration systems, and broker-transaction mandates that take real time and real money to keep up with.
And 2026 has been a landmark year for exactly this. Consider what is landing on the industry right now:
The Broker and Freight Forwarder Financial Responsibility Rule took full effect on January 16, 2026. On its face, this one actually helps carriers — it gives the FMCSA teeth to suspend a broker’s operating authority when their financial security drops below the $75,000 minimum, and it is meant to make sure carriers actually get paid when a broker goes insolvent. OOIDA had pushed for these changes for roughly fifteen years. That is a rule we can get behind, because it targets the bad actors who have been burning carriers for a decade.
The broker transparency rulemaking is the bigger and more contentious one, with a second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking targeted for spring 2026. The core idea is sensible: brokers would have to hand over an electronic record of each transaction within 48 hours of a carrier’s request, and — critically — transparency would become a “non-waivable regulatory obligation” that a contract clause could not sign away. For decades, the right to see a broker’s records technically existed under the rules, but nearly every broker-carrier contract contained a waiver that stripped that right away as a condition of doing business. Almost 7,000 public comments have already piled up on the docket, which tells you how much this one matters to people on both sides.
The registration systems themselves are changing too, with the FMCSA’s legacy filing systems giving way to a new online registration platform. Anyone who has spent an afternoon fighting a government portal knows that “modernization” and “more of my time” often arrive in the same envelope.
None of these is unreasonable on its own. Some, like the financial-responsibility rule, are genuinely good for carriers. But add them all up, layer them on top of the ordinary compliance load every operator already carries, and you get the paradox of the modern car carrier: economically freer than at any time before 1980, but buried in more administrative overhead every single year.
What this means for the person shipping a car
You might be reading this as a customer, wondering why any of it matters to you. It matters because it shapes who is actually moving your vehicle and how.
Every layer of compliance is another cost and another hurdle that small, honest carriers have to absorb — and the ones who cut corners on the paperwork are often the same ones who cut corners on your car. The reputable operators, the ones who keep their bonds current and their filings clean, are carrying a heavier load than ever just to stay in good standing. When you choose a transporter, you are indirectly choosing how seriously that operation takes the rules that protect you.
This is exactly why we built AutoShippingNearMe the way we did. We are not a faceless load board and we are not an anonymous middleman skimming a margin you never get to see. We find and vet the actual carriers — the ones running clean operations, current on their compliance, with the coverage and the track record to back it up — and we connect you directly to them. The regulatory environment is complicated. Your shipping experience should not be.
The bottom line
Deregulation in 1980 is the reason a small operator can run a car-hauling business at all, and the reason you can ship a vehicle across the country without paying the inflated rates a protected, permission-based system used to guarantee. That freedom was real, and it was earned.
But freedom on the entry side has quietly been offset by weight on the compliance side, and 2026 has piled on more of it than any year in recent memory. Some of that weight protects everyone and deserves support. Some of it is just friction. The job of a good carrier — and of a good carrier-finder standing behind them — is to carry that load so you never have to feel it.
We have been doing this long enough to know the difference between a rule that protects the customer and a rule that just protects the paperwork. And we will keep hauling both, so your car gets where it is going.
AutoShippingNearMe finds and vets quality carriers for customers shipping vehicles across the country. Founded in 2026 and built on nearly two decades of hands-on carrier and broker experience since 2007, we connect you directly with the licensed, insured carrier who actually moves your vehicle. Get a free quote at autoshippingnearme.com or call (754) 946-4922.
Why Deregulation Still Matters for the Car Carrier — and Why the Paperwork Keeps Winning
Ask anyone who has actually run a car-hauling operation what the hardest part of the job is, and they will rarely say the driving. The driving is the part we signed up for. The hard part is everything that happens before the wheels turn — the filings, the bonds, the compliance checks, the contracts, and the ever-growing stack of rules that decide whether you are even allowed to move a vehicle from one driveway to another.
At AutoShippingNearMe, we have spent close to two decades in this industry — on the carrier side and the broker side both. So when the conversation turns to regulation, we are not talking about it from a textbook. We are talking about it from the loading ramp. And the honest truth is this: the moments when the federal government stepped back are the moments the industry opened up for the little guy. The moments it stepped in are usually the moments the paperwork started eating the day.
This is not an anti-rules rant. Some regulation protects everyone — the carrier, the customer, and the reputable operators who play it straight. But it is worth understanding how we got here, because the story of the car carrier is, at its heart, a story about how much room the government gives a small operator to actually operate.
The forty-five years nobody talks about
Most people have no idea that for nearly half a century, you essentially needed the government’s permission to run a truck.
Starting with the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, interstate trucking fell under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). To operate, a carrier needed a “certificate of public convenience and necessity” — a government blessing that was famously difficult to obtain, especially for newer companies. Rates had to be filed with the ICC weeks before they took effect, and competitors could comb through those filings and challenge them. Entry into the business was tightly controlled. If you wanted to haul a certain kind of freight, on a certain route, in a certain region, you needed authority for exactly that — and the incumbents had every incentive to keep you out.
The result was a protected, comfortable industry for those already inside it, and a locked door for nearly everyone else. Salaries were high, profits were steady, and the cost of that coziness was passed straight through to the shipper and, ultimately, the consumer.
That world ended on July 1, 1980, when President Jimmy Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 into law. In his own words at the signing, the heart of the law was a call for “prompt and sweeping change of the regulations that have insulated the trucking industry from competition since 1935.”
What deregulation actually did
The 1980 Act did not eliminate all oversight — it was a partial deregulation, and safety rules stayed firmly in place. But economically, it changed everything. It removed most federal entry controls, loosened the rules on which goods a truck could carry and where, and gave individual carriers real freedom to set their own rates in response to what customers actually wanted.
The effect on the number of operators was dramatic. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of trucking companies in the United States roughly doubled. The barrier that had kept small operators out for forty-five years came down, and a flood of new entrants — many of them owner-operators rather than big fleets — poured in. Open-market entry more than doubled the share of for-hire truckers who owned their own trucks instead of drawing a company paycheck.
For the customer, the savings were enormous. By 1985, deregulation was saving shippers billions of dollars a year through lower rates and faster service. Over the following decades, real operating costs per mile fell sharply. The modern reality that you can buy a car online three states away and have it delivered to your door for a reasonable price simply did not exist in the regulated era — and it exists now in large part because that 1980 door swung open.
Here is where the honest part comes in, because credibility matters more than cheerleading: deregulation had real costs too. As the market flooded with new entrants, rates got competitive fast, and thousands of established carriers that could not adapt went under in the years that followed. Union membership fell, and average driver earnings declined over the following decades as the labor market opened up. Anyone who tells you deregulation was pure upside is selling something.
But for the small operator — the independent who wanted a shot at building a business without begging a federal commission for permission — 1980 was the year the industry became possible. That is the throughline we care about, because we live on that end of the business.
The irony of 2026: the paperwork came back through a different door
Here is the frustration that anyone running a carrier operation today feels in their bones. The economic entry barriers came down in 1980 — but the compliance burden has been climbing back up ever since, just wearing different clothes. It is no longer a certificate of public convenience and necessity. Now it is a thickening file of federal rules, bond requirements, registration systems, and broker-transaction mandates that take real time and real money to keep up with.
And 2026 has been a landmark year for exactly this. Consider what is landing on the industry right now:
The Broker and Freight Forwarder Financial Responsibility Rule took full effect on January 16, 2026. On its face, this one actually helps carriers — it gives the FMCSA teeth to suspend a broker’s operating authority when their financial security drops below the $75,000 minimum, and it is meant to make sure carriers actually get paid when a broker goes insolvent. OOIDA had pushed for these changes for roughly fifteen years. That is a rule we can get behind, because it targets the bad actors who have been burning carriers for a decade.
The broker transparency rulemaking is the bigger and more contentious one, with a second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking targeted for spring 2026. The core idea is sensible: brokers would have to hand over an electronic record of each transaction within 48 hours of a carrier’s request, and — critically — transparency would become a “non-waivable regulatory obligation” that a contract clause could not sign away. For decades, the right to see a broker’s records technically existed under the rules, but nearly every broker-carrier contract contained a waiver that stripped that right away as a condition of doing business. Almost 7,000 public comments have already piled up on the docket, which tells you how much this one matters to people on both sides.
The registration systems themselves are changing too, with the FMCSA’s legacy filing systems giving way to a new online registration platform. Anyone who has spent an afternoon fighting a government portal knows that “modernization” and “more of my time” often arrive in the same envelope.
None of these is unreasonable on its own. Some, like the financial-responsibility rule, are genuinely good for carriers. But add them all up, layer them on top of the ordinary compliance load every operator already carries, and you get the paradox of the modern car carrier: economically freer than at any time before 1980, but buried in more administrative overhead every single year.
What this means for the person shipping a car
You might be reading this as a customer, wondering why any of it matters to you. It matters because it shapes who is actually moving your vehicle and how.
Every layer of compliance is another cost and another hurdle that small, honest carriers have to absorb — and the ones who cut corners on the paperwork are often the same ones who cut corners on your car. The reputable operators, the ones who keep their bonds current and their filings clean, are carrying a heavier load than ever just to stay in good standing. When you choose a transporter, you are indirectly choosing how seriously that operation takes the rules that protect you.
This is exactly why we built AutoShippingNearMe the way we did. We are not a faceless load board and we are not an anonymous middleman skimming a margin you never get to see. We find and vet the actual carriers — the ones running clean operations, current on their compliance, with the coverage and the track record to back it up — and we connect you directly to them. The regulatory environment is complicated. Your shipping experience should not be.
The bottom line
Deregulation in 1980 is the reason a small operator can run a car-hauling business at all, and the reason you can ship a vehicle across the country without paying the inflated rates a protected, permission-based system used to guarantee. That freedom was real, and it was earned.
But freedom on the entry side has quietly been offset by weight on the compliance side, and 2026 has piled on more of it than any year in recent memory. Some of that weight protects everyone and deserves support. Some of it is just friction. The job of a good carrier — and of a good carrier-finder standing behind them — is to carry that load so you never have to feel it.
We have been doing this long enough to know the difference between a rule that protects the customer and a rule that just protects the paperwork. And we will keep hauling both, so your car gets where it is going.
AutoShippingNearMe finds and vets quality carriers for customers shipping vehicles across the country. Founded in 2026 and built on nearly two decades of hands-on carrier and broker experience since 2007, we connect you directly with the licensed, insured carrier who actually moves your vehicle. Get a free quote at autoshippingnearme.com or call (754) 946-4922.