A company that used to make in-car karaoke systems just triggered the biggest one-day sell-off in trucking stocks since the tariff wars of April 2025. If that sentence sounds absurd, welcome to the 2026 AI fear trade.
Algorhythm Holdings — a micro-cap with a market cap of roughly $6 million — announced that its SemiCab AI freight platform is helping customers scale freight volumes by 300% to 400% without adding a single employee. It also claims to reduce empty freight miles by over 70%. The stock popped 30% on the news. But the real carnage was in the companies SemiCab is theoretically disrupting.
C.H. Robinson (CHRW) cratered 24% intraday before closing down 15% — its worst single-day performance since 2019. RXO plunged 20.5%. Landstar System posted its worst day in company history, dropping 16%. JB Hunt and XPO each shed about 5%. The Russell 3000 Trucking Index fell 6.6%, and the damage spread to Europe: DHL dropped 4.9%, DSV fell 11%, and Kuehne+Nagel tanked 13%.
Let that sink in. A penny stock that pivoted from karaoke to AI freight roughly a year ago just vaporized billions in market value from an entire global industry. “Never in my wildest dreams would I ever have imagined a day like today,” said Algorhythm CEO Gary Atkinson. “It is almost like David versus Goliath.”
The broader context matters here. This is part of a category-5 AI panic sweeping through sector after sector. Software stocks got hammered first. Then office real estate. Now trucking and logistics. “The level of paranoia is category 5,” said Joseph Shaposhnik at Rainwater Equity.
But is the fear justified? Not everyone is convinced. Baird analyst Daniel Moore reiterated his outperform ratings on both C.H. Robinson and Expeditors, noting that “automation is not a new theme” in freight. The reality is that trucking is a $1 trillion industry with deeply entrenched relationships, complex regulatory requirements, and physical assets that AI simply cannot wish away.
The irony is thick: the same market that rewards companies for adopting AI is now punishing companies for being vulnerable to it — even when the “disruptor” has a market cap smaller than a nice house in San Francisco. For investors with a contrarian streak, the trucking sell-off looks less like a paradigm shift and more like a panic-driven buying opportunity. CHRW trades at roughly 17x forward earnings with $23 billion in revenue. Algorhythm trades at a $6 million valuation with a karaoke machine in its rearview mirror. Choose your fighter.