Understanding Road Transportation: 2025 updates for France, Italy and Spain
Market Monday - Week 43 - Updated charts with latest data for our country overview series
About this series
The transportation landscape in Europe represents one of the world's most sophisticated logistics networks, where many countries intersect in a complex web of trade routes and regulatory frameworks. This comprehensive series examines the key transport markets that drive Europe's logistics sector, offering data-driven insights and practical market intelligence.
Our analysis combines real-world data from the Transporeon platform with official statistics from Eurostat and other sources. Unless otherwise described, the information relates to full truckload transports but is typically applicable to other road transport segments as well.
2025 Update
We have prepared updated charts and infographics for the several countries we covered about a year ago. You can find them below, along with a summary of key changes, characterizing the developments.
France
The French road transport market experienced a pivot in direction, going from growth to a contraction in capacity. Carrier investments in new fleet, which saw a 10% rise in 2023 has been reduced dramatically in 2024 with a 13% decline in new heavy truck registrations, a downturn worse than the European average. This domestic fleet contraction is happening at the same time when France continues to be persistently highly reliant on foreign trucks moving domestic loads, as France’s cabotage share remained the second highest in Europe at 7.4%. All these events are, likely, a result of weakening freight demand, further confirmed by declining motorway utilization rate.
The market dynamic in France remains structurally imbalanced as demand is majorly inbound, with more of international transports flowing into the country than out and shrinking domestic carrier capacity. Despite persistently high levels of rejection rates, the market has seen a stabilization in spot rate variation, while being at the higher spot price levels through 2024. This suggests a challenging environment where shippers face unreliable capacity on the market, where weakening overall demand amid declining capacity prevents high price increases now at the cost of possible high spikes in the future.
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Italy
The Italian road transport market has shown notable resilience, largely avoiding the severe capacity constraints seen elsewhere in Europe in 2024. While 2023 saw strong 11% growth in truck registrations, 2024 brought only a mild dip, a figure that significantly outperformed the European average decline. This stability was also confirmed by a low and nearly unchanged cabotage share of 1,9%, a sign of an insulated domestic market. The market’s focus, within our data shifted further inward, with the share of domestic transports increasing to 55%.
The Italian market appeared slightly overheated in 2024. Capacity reduction coupled with slowly increasing demand, as confirmed by rising motorway utilization, pushed contracted prices up. The spot market was characterized by medium rejection rates and spot rate fluctuations. This points to a domestic-oriented market that, while lacking high growth and volatility, is in unstable condition due to carriers anticipating demand reduction which did not happen in 2024.
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Spain
Spain stands out as a strong exception to the European trend, demonstrating continued confidence and investment in its road transport sector. While other major markets contracted, Spain’s new heavy truck registrations continued to grow, posting a robust 7,9% increase in 2024 on top of a 19% surge in 2023. This domestic strength is confirmed by a continuously low 0,6% cabotage share and a growing focus on the internal market, which now accounts for 59% of all Spain related transports within our data.
This strong, sustained investment in capacity due to confidence in the local economy has created a reliable market for shippers. The fluctuation of rejection rates has improved, falling from medium levels to low, and average spot rate variation also decreased to 5,4%. Spain’s market is characterized by a healthy number of carriers and a growing domestic carrier base, which has led to high reliability and stable contracted rates for its shippers.
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We will continue updating other editions of the "Understanding Road Transportation" series with refreshed data, once it becomes available.
Oleksandr Kulish
Senior Consultant