HDT Talks Trucking: Most Listened to Podcast Episodes of 2021

HDT Talks Trucking, Heavy Duty Trucking’s podcast, allows listeners to go behind the scenes with the industry’s most seasoned trucking reporters as they bring you expert insights and interview industry professionals. See which episodes got the most listens in 2021:

1. What Can Fleets do About the High Cost of Insurance?

Coming in up top, the most listened to episode in 2021: battling skyrocketing insurance costs. HDT Equipment Editor and HDT Talks Trucking Host Jim Park brought on Reliance Partners' founder and CEO Andrew Ladebauche and the company's Director of Safety Brian Runnels. The pair offer advice on how fleets can lessen the impact of rising insurance premiums.

Rising insurance costs were a hot topic this year. HDT’s cover story “How Trucking Fleets Can Escape the Insurance Squeeze” also landed on HDT’s Top 10 articles of 2021. 

2. HDT Editorial Roundtable-Looking back at 2020 and ahead at 2021

Joining Jim Park this time were HDT’s team of editors: Deborah Lockridge, David Cullen and Jack Roberts. Together, they took a look back at 2020 and offered their reflections on the year through a trucking lens. Did they predict what would come in 2021…?

3. Volvo Trucks Sees Hydrogen Driving Fossil-free Trucking

In this episode from May, Volvo Group Chief Technology Officer Lars Stenqvist explains how Volvo plans to achieve fossil-fuel-freedom by 2050  using hydrogen fuel cells alongside battery-electric vehicles and biofuel- or possibly hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines.  The Volvo group sees battery-electric and fuel-cell-electric trucks as complementary rather than competitive, depending on the individual customer use case. 

4. Meet Adam Lang, winner of HDT's Safety & Compliance Award for 2020

At the start of the year, Adam Lang, Halvor Lines' chief risk officer and winner of the 2020 HDT Safety & Compliance Award, sat down with Jim Park to discuss the state of the industry. Listen to find out if he was right about the issues he thought trucking would face in 2021.

5. Electric Trucks: The Road to Cost Parity with Diesel

In April, experts from Dana joined Jim Park to talk about the road to an electric future.  The market for battery- or fuel cell-electric trucks is still in its infancy. It could be another 10-15 years before production and deployment numbers achieve a critical mass where scale begins to provide significant cost reduction. In the meantime, subsidies and incentives will keep the industry moving forward while the electrical infrastructure is built out and new efficiencies are realized in battery design and execution.