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Legal worries over patents are blocking adoption of an official standard for trailer-to-tractor warning communications. The patent issue frustrates backers of the electronic protocol called PLC4Trucks because they face a looming federal deadline to establish an accepted way to warn the driver of a faulty antilock braking system in a trailer.

Volvo, rumored in the past to be a possible purchaser of at least two other companies, has surfaced as the possible object of an acquisition by DaimlerChrysler. Dagens Industri, a daily business newspaper in Sweden, cited unnamed sources in reporting that the German-U.S. automaker will bid at least $17.7 billion for Volvo, the maker of transportation, construction, marine and aerospace equipment based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Commercial Equipment Company of Charlotte, N.C., changed its name to Lake Shore Pacific Corp. to better reflect its nationwide service network. Lake Shore Pacific will operate two regional dry van trucking divisions: Lake Shore Carrier (formerly Special Transport Service), based in Charlotte and Pacific Carrier, based in Santa Clara, Calif.

Less than a year after paying $19.3 million to buy 2.1 million shares of TransFinancial Holdings’ stock to thwart a takeover by the company’s two largest shareholders, three members of the board of directors have offered to buy out all the remaining shares for $5.25 a share, or about $17.1 million.

In a June 18 speech that boldly laid out his approach to improving safety on the highways, Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater reaffirmed the Clinton administration’s commitment to a government that works better and costs less. In doing so, Slater responded in a dramatic way to criticism by safety advocates who complained the secretary was working too closely with trucking on educational programs, research and policy initiatives.

If a proposed highway improvement project has passed every environmental test required by the federal government once — a necessary yet very expensive process that takes many months, even years, to complete — should it have to go through the same process over and over again?

Over the past two weeks, USFreightways Corp., Boyd Bros. Transportation and Covenant Transport each announced that they expect profits in the second quarter of 1999 to be higher than Wall Street estimates. The news may have sparked a bit of a rally. The Trucking Stock Index listed in Transport Topics rose 4.78% from June 11 to 18. That could be good news for long-suffering stockholders who have seen prices for most trucking stocks fall sharply over the past 12 months.

Shipments of trailers and chassis continue to drop off their pace of 1998, when they broke the previous record set three years earlier. April figures slipped 2.3% from the previous month, according to a preliminary count from the U.S. Bureau of Census. Complete trailers and chassis totaled 23,361 for April vs. 23,905 for March, indicating the downward trend that started off the year has not let up.

Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa placed Local 19 in Grapevine, Texas, under control of the International union, following the resignation of local president J.D. Potter. Hoffa named Joe Darmento, a 10-year Teamster veteran from Louisville, Ky., to serve as trustee on an interim basis. Local 19 has about 3,500 members in four states, most of whom work in airline-related industries.

A traffic manager for a New Jersey mail-order company pleaded guilty to pocketing more than $74,000 in kickbacks and hiding the income from the Internal Revenue Service. William Surdakowski pleaded guilty June 14 to failing to report $74,889 in taxable income that he received in 1994 for awarding business to an unidentified trucking company in Virginia.