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American Trucking Associations has filed suit against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s latest attempt to modify the hours-of-service rule because it believes it had no other way to prevent a serious mistake on the part of the very agency that is charged with improving safety by and for the motor carrier industry.

Volvo Trucks and Paccar Inc. last week announced plans to cut production, citing a slowdown in North American Class 8 truck orders.

WASHINGTON — While expressing support for a proposed electronic stability control mandate for heavy vehicles, the companies that make those vehicles strongly objected to the regulation’s test procedure for getting vehicles certified and urged federal regulators to consider alternative tests.

UPS Inc. raised second-quarter earnings to $1.12 billion, with help from its less-than-truckload unit, but the biggest parcel and freight carrier warned that its second-half profit will be diminished by a weakening U.S. economy.

U.S. retail diesel and gasoline prices rose for the third straight week, taking back more of the substantial cost drops that dominated the second quarter of the year, the Department of Energy reported July 23.

Four months after delaying a planned rollout of a system that would assign safety scores for truck crashes based on a carrier’s responsibility, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it will spend the next year studying how it could implement such a program and whether it would be worth the $3 million it could cost annually.

Changes announced in December to the federal hours-of-service rule rely on a “sham” of an analysis and unjustifiable assumptions, American Trucking Associations told a federal court last week, urging the court to overturn the provisions of the rule that restrict the 34-hour restart and require an off-duty break.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has notified four interstate tolling authorities in New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania that it has launched an inquiry into how they decide to raise tolls and how they spend the money.

New engine technologies and improved aerodynamics have yielded significant fuel efficiency gains for carriers running post-2010 heavy-duty trucks, but some fleet executives said they are encountering some new maintenance issues.

Trucking bankruptcies reached their lowest level in at least 25 years during the second quarter as freight demand and pricing remained strong enough to sustain virtually every fleet, a new Avondale Partners report said.