Earlier this year, I wrote about the new European Union logistics regulations, and back then the question was whether carriers and their customers were ready for what was coming. Now that the new rules are in effect, the market has changed, but some things are still far from adapting to the new reality.

Since July 1, light commercial vehicles above 2.5 tonnes and up to 3.5 tonnes operating internationally have been brought into the EU driving and rest-time framework, with mandatory smart tachographs and new compliance obligations.

But the economy can’t stop: Customers still need urgent parts and production lines still need components. A shipment collected today is still expected to arrive tomorrow, but what it takes to fulfil this need has changed.

And so there’s a discussion that carriers and clients need to have and be honest about: Next-day delivery is still possible, but we can't keep pretending it costs the same to provide it.

The Demand Hasn't Disappeared

There was an assumption in parts of the market that the new rules would simply make express transport slower. For some operators, that's exactly what happened. But the underlying demand hasn't disappeared. If a manufacturer has a production line waiting on a component, the fact that a driver's legal driving time has changed doesn't make that component any less urgent. The customer still needs it tomorrow. The question is: Has the transport company built an operation that can deliver it legally?

The old LGV model was simple: put a driver in a van, give them a route, and let them drive. That flexibility is now constrained.

Take a route like Emilia-Romagna to Stuttgart — a roughly nine-hour urgent freight run crossing Austria, with two border crossings, a mandatory 45-minute break, and notoriously difficult secure parking for light commercial vehicles. It's a particularly sensitive route because it's time-critical parts freight, where a delay can carry a significant financial cost for the customer. For an operator running that kind of route, the answer can't simply be to tell the customer the shipment will now arrive later.

The operators that still offer next-day service have largely converged on the same answer, in one form or another: rotating drivers, so that when one driver has to take the legally required rest, the operation itself doesn't have to stop with them. There will inevitably be operators looking for clever ways around the new rules. But you can't build a reliable logistics business on loopholes. The operation itself has to be able to work while respecting them.

EU Mobility Package Compliance

All of this costs more, and there's not much value in pretending otherwise. It requires more drivers, more hotel accommodation, more software and planning capacity, and more management bandwidth. Across operators, the overall cost of running this kind of network has increased by somewhere around 20% — and that figure isn't just the price of a tachograph.

The additional costs constitute the biggest piece of the pie and yet most of the public conversation doesn’t talk enough about them. Planning, driver requirements, accommodation, software requirements, and management structures all have to change along with the tachograph requirements. So we all know in the industry that compliance costs money, but the question is: Who ends up paying for it?

Today, much of that additional cost is still being absorbed by carriers rather than passed on, and that can’t continue indefinitely. A carrier can absorb higher costs for a period of time to protect a customer relationship or stay competitive in a tight market, but if the underlying cost structure has permanently changed, continuing to sell the same service at yesterday's price isn't a sustainable business model.

A customer, meanwhile, sees a delivery requirement — "I need this tomorrow" — without necessarily seeing everything sitting behind that promise. They don't see the additional driver, hotel booking, extra layer of planning, or the software and management infrastructure required to make the movement compliant.

From the customer's seat, the shipment still moves from A to B. But customers can no longer reasonably expect the same delivery times at the same prices when the operation behind that promise has completely changed. If next-day delivery is absolutely critical to your business, then next-day capacity has to be treated as it is: a part of the operation with a new, ongoing cost.

How Express Carriers Are Responding

We're already starting to see different reactions across the market. Some carriers have stopped serving certain routes altogether, while others are investing in the infrastructure they need to maintain their existing service levels. There isn't necessarily a right or wrong decision here. Every carrier has to look at what its business can realistically support economically.

But customers need to understand the difference between the two. A carrier that says "we can still provide next-day delivery" needs to have a real operating model behind that promise. It’s no longer about the van capacity to make it, but whether the entire network can make that journey legally, reliably, and repeatedly.

That is the biggest lesson from the first months of enforcement: Companies that keep managing international express transport exactly as they did before are going to run into problems.

Logistics management under the new rules requires:

• More sophisticated planning and more professional driver management;
• Routes that account for legal constraints from the very start, and
• Customers to be part of these conversations early.

Simply telling a customer "sorry, it now takes longer and costs more" after the fact is not going to work in a competitive market. If another operator has invested properly in its network and can still deliver the service the customer needs, there’s very little stopping that customer from moving their business there.

Investing in Drivers

There's another part of this transition deserves far more attention than it's currently getting, and that's the people actually driving the vans. If the new operating model requires more drivers to keep a route compliant, then drivers can't simply be treated as another line item on the cost sheet, to be minimized wherever possible.

In practice, that means paying drivers well, booking proper hotels rather than the cheapest available option, respecting rest periods, and making sure drivers get real, meaningful time with their families between long runs. A 24-hour service depends entirely on people who are willing and able to sustain that kind of work over time. If drivers are exhausted, unhappy or constantly uncertain about where they'll sleep or when they'll get home, the network will eventually fail, regardless of how sophisticated the planning software behind it happens to be.

Express Transport Needs a New Agreement

The commercial need for next-day European delivery is still very much there, and that’s not likely to change. We need to be considerably more honest, on both sides, about what it actually takes to provide it.

Carriers need to invest in people, technology, planning and assets, even when that investment’s return will only be visible in the medium to long term. Customers need to become more organized and flexible about their shipments, rather than assuming urgency can always be solved by a carrier’s ability to improvise. And both sides need to accept what this means in practice: urgency has a cost, and this cost has to fall somewhere.

There will always be shipments where paying for speed makes commercial sense, such as a production line waiting on a critical component. But the market as a whole has to stop treating express capacity as if it were unlimited and endlessly interchangeable.

The first phase of this regulatory change was fundamentally about compliance. The next phase is going to be about economics, and its consequences will be far heavier for the industry.

Can carriers continue providing the same service while absorbing the additional cost themselves? Not indefinitely. Will some operators withdraw from parts of the express market altogether? We're already seeing early signs of exactly that. Will customers eventually have to pay more for reliable next-day capacity? I believe they will, whether that happens gradually or all at once.

The important thing is to understand that this goes beyond a price increase. The service itself now requires more to exist: different networks, investment in people, and compliance built into daily operations. We can continue delivering across Europe the next day. But doing it reliably and legally costs more than it did before, and sooner or later the market will have to decide if it’s willing to pay for that.

Koert Bloemers is the founder and chief executive officer of Van Express and author of The 2026 EU Logistics Transformation Playbook.