For as long as equipment finance has existed as an industry, transportation has been its metronome. The freight cycle ran with almost mechanical regularity: capacity tightens, rates spike, owner-operators flood in on financed tractors, capacity overshoots, rates collapse, the marginal carriers exit, used truck values absorb the exits, and the survivors buy the recovery at the bottom. Every credit model in the sector — loss curves, recovery assumptions, portfolio limits — was fit to that sine wave across four decades of repetitions.

The most recent downturn broke the pattern, and the break looks structural rather than episodic. The freight recession that began in 2022 ran materially longer than any downcycle in the modern data — roughly twice the duration of the historical average — while producing capacity exit that was slower, later, and differently distributed than every prior episode. A model fit to the old wave did not merely miss the timing; it misdescribed the mechanics. And a lender still underwriting to it is now mispricing the sector in both directions: overestimating the reliability of the historical recovery pattern, and underestimating the opportunity in segments the old model penalizes.