Autonomous Trucking, Innovation and Fleet Data

Today in The Garage, we’re recording live at ACT Expo 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Here at this hall, the show floor is filled with technologies of all kinds from fleets to fuel technologies and trucks and everything.

And one of the things we’re learning as we talk to more and more customers is the diversity of needs of different fleets and their operations.

We’re seeing cases where fleets are interested to understand autonomous vehicles and autonomous technologies, how they’re helping to optimize their operations. We’re seeing how different drivetrains from electric to biodiesel to conventional diesel and everything in between can affect their sustainability and their operations.

And we’re seeing how fleets deal with different kinds of issues ranging from safety, driver behavior, anticipating breakdowns, even anticipating driver problems in the future.

1:01 Guest Introduction: Matt McLelland

To talk about that, we wanted to bring on a guest who’s working with one of the leading fleets in the industry. And so our guest today is Matt McClelland, who runs innovation and sustainability at Covenant Logistics. Matt joined us to talk about their experience as a fleet, the technologies they care about and what they’re looking to use in the future. And he tells some really interesting stories about practical uses of how technology can benefit fleets. It’s a very interesting conversation.

Let’s go!

Welcome to The Garage. I’m John Heinlein, Chief Marketing Officer with Sonatus. We’re here at ACT Expo 2026 in Las Vegas and excited to be visiting with Matt. Matt, welcome to The Garage. Hey.

Thanks for having me.

I’m so excited to, to chat with you.

We’re appreciate you spending some time with us.

Yeah.

Can you start by telling us about you and your background?

Sure. Yep. Matt McLelland. I do sustainability and innovation for Covenant Logistics.

We are a, for those of you who don’t know, a a third party logistics provider. We have warehousing, trucking, freight brokerage, managed transportation, but we have a lot of trucks. Right? And that’s why I’m here.

2:17 Matt’s Role and Focus on Innovation

I’m here to look at alternative fuels. I’m here to look at all the things that I need to know about to present customers greener, cleaner, leaner solutions than what we’re doing today. There’s also some other things too that fall under the innovation umbrella, but for the most part, you know, I’m here for the trucks, and I’m here for the, actually, here for some of the AI. Okay.

Yeah. Well, hopefully, talk all those things.

Yeah. Yeah. So tell us about your background. What what did you do before? What’s your background from?

Oh, wow. You know, it’s sort of funny. I was in IT for a long time, like our mutual friend Yeah.

That introduced us in the first place.

Lawrence was also on the podcast.

Lawrence was on the podcast. Yeah. Go Lawrence. So, I was in IT for pretty much all my career. I ended up, running an innovation lab at a 3PL, a competitor to ours.

Well, the idea was we had ten thousand square feet to fill with the latest and greatest technologies that were going on in the warehouse, robots, drones that scanned inventory, like all these things that customers want were paying us millions of dollars a year to come in and and provide, you know, the best solutions available. They wanted to see all the stuff that was out there on the edge. I did that for this company, Kenco Logistics, for several years, ended up pivoting and going to Covenant. And so Covenant’s where I’ve been for the last eight years. I think I came in more of a innovation IT role, but it pivoted to be more sustainability probably back in, like, 2018/2019.

My career is the same.

And I’ve I’ve I started out with one background, and I pivoted to adjacent things.

And it’s funny how your career path works.

I didn’t apply for this job. It evolved. In fact, one day, our CEO said, let’s talk about your role, your KPIs. Like, let’s talk about your title.

And, you know, it’s kind of a longer story, but at the time, there were lots of questions about autonomy. There were lots of questions about electric trucks. There were lots of questions about alternative fuels. There was a lot of that stuff, John, that we were already doing.

Was a way just to kind form together and Put it together, put it under a title, put it under a department, and that’s where we are today.

4:09 Personal Insights and Fun Facts

It’s it’s fantastic. Well, gotta start by telling you gotta tell us a fun fact about you. We always like to get our know our guests.

Oh, wow. Fun fact. So I’m a really I fly hang gliders and dive with sharks once a month and everything, but I was in Antarctica in January And when was a National Geographic expedition ship.

That’s fantastic.

Yeah. It was so cool.

And how long was the trip for?

We were there for twelve days.

Took two days to get over the Drake Passage, five days there, and then two days to get to Drake Passage, six days there, and then two days to get back.

Well, that’s a pretty incredible story.

Yeah. The Drake Passage is one of the most craziest, you know, crossings ever. It’s where three oceans come together and there’s these giant waves, and we actually didn’t have bad weather. We had great weather. So it was a fantastic trip.

That’s incredible. I can’t touch that at all.

So I’ll tell you a different one…It’s not a competition.

You mentioned diving. I’m a big scuba diver.

Oh, good.

Fantastic. Former scuba instructor. That’s another story for another time. Fantastic.

Lots of live-aboard scuba diving Me too. Which is great fun.

Love it. There you go.

My wife does it, my son does it, it’s a family affair.

There’s our connection. Yeah. Fantastic.

I knew I liked you.

Alright.

5:10 Current Trends in Commercial Vehicle Technology

So we’re here at the show, ACT. It’s full of the most incredible, diverse Yep. Commercial vehicle technology of all shapes and sizes, electric and biofuels and trucks, big, small tractors, trailers. What what’s the technology that’s really exciting you right now, and what’s on your mind right now?

You know, it’s interesting. There’s, know, there’s no one thing. Right? I mean, we like to say that in my quiver of solutions, right, I’m gonna have some diesel trucks.

I’m gonna have some electric trucks. I’m gonna have some CNG trucks. Right now, we’re a fleet that is mostly diesel trucks. In fact, it’s all diesel trucks.

We’re long haulers, which means we go long distances. Sometimes we have two drivers in the trucks. We can go up to a thousand miles a day.

There are not a lot of decarbonized solutions that will take us the distance that we need to go. Also, pretty much anything that’s not diesel is generally, but not all the time, more expensive. And so these are really hard conversations we have to have with our shippers. They want to know what sorts of solutions can you bring to the table.

It’s my job to kinda know what they all are, present those, talk about the cost increase, talk about the cost benefits, and we just sort of go through those. And we have some electric yard hustlers, which was kind of new for us in the last few years. We’re looking at class eight electrification right now. In fact, in a few weeks, we’re gonna be doing a demo of the Tesla Semi, which we’re super excited about.

That’s great.

So it sounds like you’re really putting your ear to the ground watching these technologies, understanding where do they make sense, why do they make sense, when do they fit into your fleet, when do they fit in your portfolio?

Yep, exactly. Okay.

6:41 Exploring Autonomous Vehicle Technologies

Now and talking about technology, mean, podcast, we look at software, we look at artificial intelligence, especially. How do you see technology…What are some things you’re looking at that technology think can add value to either your fleet directly or fleets like you?

So five years ago, I started…I was invited to be a part of when the early TuSimple—when TuSimple was still a thing, right—TuSimple is autonomous class eight trucks. Went down, looked at what they were doing, listened. They were really one of the first ones. Right?

Anthony Levandowski and some of these other folks from Pronto and, oh gosh, what was it, Otto, there were some early stage ones that were getting some attention back in maybe 2019. But in 2020, looked at TuSimple, then we looked at Kodiak, then we looked at Embark, which is no longer around, then Torq, Aurora, you know, so we’re kind of have partnerships with Aurora and Torq. But the idea of being an expedited fleet, so we we cover long distances at night, is really a really interesting fit for autonomy. So talk about the ultimate AI.

Right? You got a class eight truck that with the trailer and everything, and it weighs eighty thousand pounds. You’re potentially going down the road without a driver. I mean, it doesn’t get more AI than that.

Yeah. Right?

It’s pretty incredible.

So I’ve been I’ve been in that world for the last five years. A lot of the things, John, I love about my job is I not only get to talk to our shippers, talk to our senior leadership, but I also go to all these meetings and I’m with JB Hunt, I’m with Warner, I’m with CR England. I’m with Schneider. I’m with all my competitors. Right? People that I compete against, but we’re all trying to look at technology.

We’re all trying to look at how this incredible thing called autonomous vehicles brings us all together because we we all need each other. We all need to buy trucks in order for it to be a sustainable solution for people. So, you know, I get to be with my peers and my competitors at the same time.

You know, it’s an interesting perspective you say there because on the one hand, people a lot of times say, what’s the key competition against, for example, the kind of things we do. And a lot of times it’s OEMs or providers trying to do everything themselves. And I think one of my observations is that trying to do everything yourself and trying to reinvent all the wheels is a great way to never deliver a solution. Yeah. You really need to share technologies and the kind of thing you’re talking about working with your competitors to find common solutions where it makes sense and compete where it makes sense, I think is an interesting balance.

Yeah. You know, the whole rising tide floats all boats? Right. Well, the the tide is a a class of new solutions that weren’t available before.

Right.

You know, Aurora or Torq or Kodiak, they’re not gonna be I just saw a demo. That’s what I mean, and Waabi, I don’t want leave her out, Raquel and her team at Waabi. But if they just have trucks to one provider, they’re not going to be successful.

They need to sell trucks to everybody.

And so we’re working together to kind of figure out, you know, what sorts of problems they haven’t solved yet. Are there things that we can do to work together, oddly enough, in order to make this work? So we currently don’t have any. We’re not testing any autonomous trucks right now. We’re looking at it. You know, we’re always open to anything.

9:51 Challenges in Fleet Management

So I mean, your your fleet, it sounds like for your fleet, you’re you try to keep your trucks relatively a short time. And that’s a that’s the affects your methodology and how you do things. Obviously, fleets have different mixtures of things. We were chatting earlier that, you know, depending on the fleet’s needs and depending on the missions of different fleets, they may have different approaches to, for example, maintenance, preventative diagnostics, and so on. What are some of the technologies you’ve seen that you think are interesting, rising rising technologies in this area?

You know, what’s interesting is you bring up the length of ownership. Right. Some of the investments that you can make in a truck, you have to own it for longer than two years in order to make it pay off. And so that’s some of the challenge, which is the way our trade cycle works.

A newer truck is also a recruitment retention tool for us. And so there are lot of reasons why it’s two years for us, it’s three years maybe for some of our competitors. But sometimes we have to pass on a technology because the payoff you know, exceeds the length of time we’re gonna own it. But electric APUs is something we’ve done. That’s a device for the listeners who may not know what it is. It’s a bank of batteries that lives under the seat of the sleeper cab.

And it charges during the day while the truck is moving.

And then at night, it runs an air conditioner or heating unit or a CPAP machine so you don’t have to run the engine.

Running. Exactly.

Yeah. So you’re not, so, a truck burns about a eight tenths of a gallon, of fuel, per hour just idling. And then there’s all the stuff coming out of the tailpipe. Right?

And there’s that. And then but there’s the rattling and there’s the noise and, you know, then you’ve got about fifty other trucks that are around you all doing the same thing. Right. It’s just you get out of your truck with fifty trucks idling.

You’re like, oh, what is this on my body? I just wanna go to the bathroom.

So it’s not very green. It’s not very cost efficient, and it makes noise for the driver trying to sleep.

But we do these because they cost justify themselves with both hard and soft cost over the period of ownership that we have the truck. So it’s a really good fit for us. It’s funny because we don’t there are probably better uses of capital as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. But the way our leadership team looks at it, if we don’t lose money and we don’t make money, it’s the right thing to do.

It’s the right thing to do in the environment. It’s the right thing to do for our drivers. It’s the right thing to do sort of for the industry. And so that’s an investment that we’ve we’ve made for a long time.

12:09 The Importance of Data in Fleet Operations

That’s great. Yeah. I mean, we talked earlier about data. I mean, data is the lifeblood of so many different technologies.

And I think we were looking at some work we’re showing here at the show. Yes, great, very impressive stuff.

Well, you for about, for example, monitoring driver distraction The safety stuff. Preventative maintenance, a number of things like that. You know, what’s data like to you and how much with your IT background, how much does data kind of live and breathe for you all day long?

The devil’s in the details, right? And the details is always, you know, the data, right?

12:39 Without Data you’re just another person with an opinion

Sometimes some of my friends, we get into arguments about, you know, politics and sports and all kinds of different things. But I’m always saying, do you…what what’s the data behind it? Like, tell me where you got that statistic. And sometimes people just don’t Right.

Like, you so you just made it up is what you’re saying. You know? So I’m a big data guy. Right?

I have a cup on my desk at home that says, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”. Right? Right? You want one?

I love it. I got an extra one.

I love it.

Yeah. So, you know, I’m I’m all about it. I think without it, you know and by the way, my wife drives her nuts, you know, when we get into a a debate about something and she’s like, it’s like, why do you feel that way? Like, I don’t know.

I just feel that way. I’m like, well, I’m not a I’m a data guy. You gotta give me an you know, give me an example of what you’re talking about. So I’m a big data guy.

So what you’re doing here and what Sonatus is doing is fantastic.

Collect you know, I think sometimes as normal humans like I am, you’re a PhD.

EE PhD. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s not me. But sometimes I need a tool like Claude or like some of things you’re working on to help me connect dots. I just recently uploaded three different spreadsheets into Claude. It was lane data, truck load, or fuel stop location data, and some other data points because I trying to figure out to put all this together and create a graph and I uploaded it in this thing and it helped me connect dots and data points that I really didn’t think made sense. But once it did, thirty seconds later, I had a beautiful slide that I could show to the customer that answered the exact question they asked me to answer.

It’s such an important point you make that when you have a data, I like to say to one plus one equals three or one plus one equals seven. If you have different data sources on their own, great. When you combine them, you can find insights that weren’t there, weren’t easy to find. One of the things we’re showing in one of the demos we showed you earlier was how we can take data from the vehicle that maybe they’re getting from their data provider, its existing data, but we combine it with other data that they don’t have and add more value, add more, whether it’s insight or diagnostics or anticipating failures or a range of things. But it’s when you combine those data sources that you get to potentially new levels of insight. That’s one of the things we’re trying to focus on.

Yeah, I do a presentation on sort of innovation and disruption. Every once and once, sometimes I get asked to do a keynote, but I have this slide that says data without context is meaningless. And so sometimes it’s these extra data points, right, that, you know, independently don’t mean anything, but together that provides context that we need in order to make the kind of decisions we have to make.

15:04 Diagnosing problems with vehicles and drivers

It’s true. It’s true. And we’re showing another diagnostic product that probably is more targeted towards OEMs than less to yourself and your fleet customer. But one of the engineers that was working with us said that when we show them the analysis is we say, Hey, we see that there’s this thing.

And we say, We think this is why your vehicle’s failing. And then they say, But prove it to me. Ah, they say, Here’s why. We’re showing you, Here’s the source data we came with.

Here’s your page seventy four of your service manual, and here’s the service history. And you put it all together like, now I believe you. So it’s the opposite of whatever the opposite of a hallucination is. It’s showing our homework, showing the references that there’s real meat there.

We use a product. Maybe it’s a competitor, so I’m not gonna use their name. But when they pitched it to us, he said, I’m gonna give you an example of something that happened with somebody that we went live with. He said, we called a driver in the office.

HR manager said, hey. I want you to sit down. We have a problem. The guy had no idea he was talking about.

He said, our software says that you’re gonna have a wreck in the next two weeks.

And he was like, what are you talking about? He said, you know, like, remember my Minority Report. I knew you were gonna say that. Yeah.

And they’re like, well, it’s not one thing. You’ve had erratic time off. Yeah. The —what is it, J132 port, whatever—the truck shows that you’ve had an unusual, you’ve had some curb strikes, you’ve had erratic acceleration.

There is, requested a different cycle in your pay, you asked for an advance on something.

There was, you were late for some of your deliveries. You were late showing up for work. So independently pattern. None of these things mean anything.

But all this data lived in six different systems. Together, you put it all together. He said, what’s going on? And the guy just looked at the HR manager and said, “My dad is in the hospital, and he’s probably gonna have to go to memory care, and I can’t stop thinking about it”, and he starts tearing up. And he says, I can’t concentrate because I’m worried about my dad. And so that HR manager said, go take a week off, paid, go deal with this, come back to work, everything’s gonna be fine. So, you know, reading the tea leaves and what the tools like you guys are developing or do are gonna help you help safety departments, help HR departments solve those problems.

17:19 Real-World Applications of Data Insights

It’s true. And, you know, in safety and downtime and it’s all rolls together. Right? Yeah. You know, this guy now is he’s been taken care of. They’ve avoided potentially a wreck.

They’ve even…He loves it.

They love the company Everyone wins.

Yeah. Right? So sometimes I think when you can add these solutions together, you can create, as I said, more than the sum of the parts.

Yeah, absolutely.

17:44 Highlights from the Expo

So what’s your favorite thing you’ve seen at the show show here this week?

You know, we’re doing this Tesla Semi demo. Yeah. And and I was there at the factory a few weeks ago, so I got to see it. But, know, here it’s out in the hall. You know, it’s the new one. Right? It’s the production ready version.

And so it’s super excited to see that.

International has this thing called S13 engine, which is very different than the way traditional engines work. So there’s better fuel economy. There’s some cleaner aspects to it on the emissions. That’s super cool to look at.

But really, the the hall just opened yesterday. So, you know We’ll after this after this podcast is over, I’m gonna go out and walk the halls.

Fantastic. Hey, listen. I really appreciate you spending some time with us. I know you’re busy.

18:26 Closing Thoughts and Future Perspectives

Yeah. It’s great to hear perspectives like yourself’s. Your fleet needs are different than other fleets we talk to. With the super valuable perspective, you were challenging us and giving us some great ideas a few minutes ago.

So we’re thrilled to have you and enjoy the show.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

All right.

All right. Appreciate it.

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