The auto hauling industry is seeing a shakeup with the apparent demise of Jack Cooper Transport.
Often, trucking company closures happen following a long trend of indications of trouble. That wasn’t the case for Jack Cooper Transport, one of the biggest auto haulers, which is shutting down its business after losing its two largest customers in barely six weeks.
But 2025 started with a bang, and not a good one, for the unionized auto hauler, as Ford —believed to be its second-largest customer — invoked a clause in its contract allowing it to terminate its contract with Jack Cooper with a 30-day notice.
Just five weeks later, talks went sideways with its largest customer, General Motors, according to published reports, as the car hauler sought to renegotiate its contract with GM in the wake of Ford’s move.
According to the Detroit Free Press, as those “intense negotiations” were happening, on Thursday, Feb. 6, GM ordered a temporary stop on all its vehicle shipments with Jack Cooper. This led to the scene painted by the Freep of Jack Cooper truck drivers unloading the brand-new Corvettes that they had just loaded at GM’s assembly plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
By 11 p.m. Friday, Feb. 7, those talks ended, according to the paper. On early Saturday, GM restarted shipments of its new vehicles to dealerships using other haulers.
“As to who ended the 97-year relationship, both sides pointed at the other,” the paper reported.
What Jack Cooper’s Closure Means for the Car Hauler Industry
The transportation advisers at investment firm Stifel told investors in an email Monday that this “could be an even more meaningful bankruptcy than 2023’s closure of Yellow Freight in the less-than-truckload world.”
Ironically, last year Jack Cooper had sought to resurrect Yellow Freight, but its offer was refused in favor of liquidation.
Other auto haulers stand to benefit from the demise of Jack Cooper, Stifel said, including Proficient Auto Logistics, “one of the few small-scale players in the business that has been investing in service and capacity.”
The auto transporter had been hauling vehicles for GM for nearly a century. The relationship between Ford and Jack Cooper had lasted for decades.
Was Being Unionized a Problem for Jack Cooper?
Jack Cooper has approximately 2,500 employees. About 1,700 of them are members of the Teamsters. There has been speculation that being a unionized carrier has been a problem for the carrier.
In 2019, the company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing difficulty competing with its mostly non-union industry.
The carrier got its start in 1928 when Jack Cooper founded a carrier for General Motors in Kansas City, Missouri. Since then, Jack Cooper Holdings grew to include several businesses and a full range of automotive transportation and logistics services spanning the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It boasted one of the largest fleets of finished vehicle carriers in North America.
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