Backloading for hauliers means matching live, unplanned orders to a truck's spare capacity on a route it's already running, instead of sending it back to base empty. In live deployment, Anteam Reload™ has cut empty legs by 50% and CO2 by 34% per matched delivery, while increasing profit by 16%.
The Empty Leg Problem, in a Haulier's Own Numbers
UK government figures put HGV empty running at around 28 to 30% of total vehicle mileage (Department for Transport, 2026), a figure that's barely moved in years. For a haulier running a mixed fleet across multiple lanes, that's close to a third of vehicle mileage generating fuel cost, driver time and wear with no delivered goods and no revenue to show for it.
Why Manual Backloading Only Catches the Easy Matches
A dispatcher matching backloads by phone and memory can reliably cover the lanes they know well and the customers they've worked with before. What gets missed is everything else: an odd-shaped gap in a route, a smaller order that only pays off with a short detour, or a new lane nobody's quoted before. None of those are hard to match in principle, they're just too time-consuming to check by hand across hundreds of live routes.
How Reload Matches Orders to a Haulier's Own Routes
Reload is trained on a haulier's own routes and order history, not a shared general model, so the matches it surfaces reflect how that specific fleet actually runs, not an industry average. For every live order, it calculates the actual detour cost in distance, time and remaining capacity, and only surfaces the match to a dispatcher when the detour is worth less than the empty mile it replaces.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much can backloading actually save a haulier?
In live deployment, Anteam Reload has reduced empty legs by 50% and cut CO2 emissions by 34% per AI-matched delivery, while increasing profit by 16%.
Why don't hauliers already backload every empty leg?
UK government figures put HGV empty running at around 28 to 30% of total vehicle mileage. Most fleets still match backloads by phone and driver memory, which only catches the obvious, familiar-lane matches, not the harder ones that need a real detour calculation.
Does automated backloading work with our own fleet's data, or a shared pool?
Anteam Reload is trained on a haulier's own routes and order history, not a shared general model, so matches reflect how that specific fleet actually runs. Your data and supplier network are not pooled or shared with other customers.
Backloading, Run on Your Own Fleet's Data
Anteam Reload™ matches live orders to a haulier's existing routes automatically, cutting empty legs by 50% and CO2 by 34% per matched delivery while lifting profit by 16%. Book a demo to see it against your own routes.
Related reading: what backloading actually means and how it differs from backhaul, and AI quoting for freight forwarders, a matching problem with the same manual-doesn't-scale root cause.