For years, European shippers evaluated carriers through a familiar set of KPIs: on-time delivery, damage ratios, communication responsiveness, cost per kilometer. These numbers shaped tenders, quarterly reviews, supplier scorecards and internal dashboards. But over the last two years, RoadFreightCompany has observed a fundamental shift: these metrics no longer describe real carrier performance. The issue isn’t that carriers suddenly became worse. It’s that the market changed so quickly, and so structurally, that the old KPIs simply cannot capture how EU road freight actually operates in 2025. They were designed for a stable, linear environment. Today’s environment is anything but linear.
Take on-time delivery. Traditionally the most important KPI, it collapses under conditions of volatility. A carrier can execute perfectly and still fail the metric because the disruption happens outside its control. One RoadFreightCompany client on the BE–DE corridor saw punctuality drop from 97% to 71% in a single week due entirely to temporary border inspections that created multi-kilometer queues. Another client on the IT–DE lane faced a 22% deviation after a delayed ocean vessel offloaded a concentrated batch of containers, blocking access roads for hours. The KPI records the delay but not the reason behind it, turning a structural disruption into what looks like a carrier failure. The data becomes misleading.
Communication metrics deteriorate for the same reason. A late reply does not necessarily reflect poor service but can stem from systemic overload: a tunnel closure forces rerouting, several customers escalate at once due to a macro disruption, or a subcontractor two levels down is still providing incomplete data. The communication score drops, yet what it truly reflects is rising complexity, not lack of professionalism. Companies that interpret these scores literally misjudge their partners.
The biggest distortion, however, appears in subcontracting chains. The expansion of “grey capacity” means large portions of EU freight are now executed by subcontractors the shipper never selected and often does not even know exist. A shipper may believe it is evaluating its contracted carrier, while in reality the job is performed by a completely different company hired hours before loading. KPI accuracy collapses because the metric is no longer tied to the actual operator.
This is why RoadFreight Company is moving its clients away from legacy KPIs and toward metrics that evaluate resilience rather than an outdated idea of stability. In a volatile market, the critical question is not whether a carrier is perfectly punctual during calm periods, but how it behaves when the plan breaks. A carrier’s recovery speed after a disruption often matters more than the disruption itself. Predictability of deviation matters more than absolute precision. Transparency in the subcontractor chain matters more than communication scores. Some shippers now assess performance specifically during “stress weeks” – periods of regulatory shifts, holiday surges or ocean-driven congestion – because those are the weeks that reveal true operational maturity.
In conversations with RoadFreightCompany clients, one sentiment repeats itself: carriers have not deteriorated; the environment has changed faster than the measurement system. Companies that continue to rely on yesterday’s KPIs will continue to see a distorted picture of their supply chains. Companies that redesign their evaluation models for today’s volatility will finally see operations as they actually function – fragmented, fast-moving, dependent on adaptability rather than perfection.
The winners of the coming decade will not be the ones demanding flawless punctuality. They will be the ones building logistics processes that can absorb imperfection without breaking.