I tried to check my European carrier's safety record. It doesn't exist.

I ordered something from a Danish online shop last week. The tracking email said the carrier was CoolRunner, a logistics company based in Copenhagen.

When the package showed up, the delivery driver was wearing a GLS uniform. Somewhere between Denmark and my door, my parcel changed hands at least once, and I had no visibility into who was handling it.

This wouldn't bother most people. But I work with US carrier data every day, and in the States, I could have looked up any motor carrier in about 30 seconds. So I tried to do the same with GLS in Europe. I wanted their safety record, their inspection history, anything at all.

I found nothing useful. Not because GLS is a bad company (they're one of Europe's largest parcel networks), but because that kind of information simply doesn't exist in any public, searchable form.

What the FMCSA gives you for free

In the United States, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration runs a system called SAFER (Safety and Fitness Electronic Records). Every carrier that operates across state lines gets a USDOT number. That number works as the carrier's public identity, and it unlocks a full profile:

• Operating authority status (active, revoked, pending, not authorized)
• Insurance coverage and policy details
• Roadside inspection results and out-of-service rates
• Crash history going back two years
• Safety ratings from compliance reviews
• Fleet size, driver count, and vehicle information

All of it is free. Anyone can search it. The FMCSA also publishes an API, which lets companies like ours pull this data automatically. When a freight broker needs to decide whether to trust a carrier with a load, they can check the carrier's DOT number on CarrierOwl and see a full safety profile in seconds.

There are over 500,000 active carriers in the FMCSA database, each with a public record anyone can inspect. It's one of those things you take for granted in the US until you try to find something similar elsewhere.

What Europe has instead

Almost nothing, as it turns out.

European road transport is regulated at the national level. Each of the 27 EU member states runs its own transport authority. In Denmark, it's Faerdselsstyrelsen. In Germany, the Bundesamt fuer Gueterverkehr. France has the DGITM. Every country has its own system, its own data formats, its own language, and its own opinion about what should be public information.

Europe has no equivalent of the DOT number and no shared carrier identifier that works across borders. There's no SAFER-like public database and no API to pull data from.

The EU does have Regulation 1071/2009, which sets minimum standards for road transport operators (financial standing, professional competence, good repute, and establishment in a member state). But enforcement and record-keeping happen nationally, and the data stays locked inside each country's system. A French regulator has no easy way to check whether a Polish carrier has been flagged for safety issues in Germany.

Some countries conduct roadside inspections under EU Directive 2014/47/EU, and the results feed into a system called ERRU (European Register of Road Transport Undertakings). But ERRU is an internal tool for regulators. The public can't access it, and there's no way to search a carrier's name and pull up their inspection history. The system exists, but not for people like you or me.

Why this probably won't change

I spent some time thinking about whether someone could build a European FMCSA. The honest answer: probably not, and not anytime soon.

The problems are structural. You'd need 27 countries to agree on a common data format, adopt a shared identifier system, define public access rules, and actually fund the infrastructure to run it. That kind of coordination took the EU years for something as straightforward as standardizing phone chargers. Carrier safety data touches on privacy law and national sovereignty, and it would mean reworking bureaucratic systems that have operated independently for decades.

Then there's GDPR. The FMCSA database includes information about company officers, individual violations, and specific incidents. Publishing that kind of data in Europe would collide with privacy regulations that don't apply the same way in the US. Even if a European regulator wanted to open up their inspection records, their legal team would need a long time to figure out what's shareable.

Language is a real obstacle too. The FMCSA ingests data in one language, in one format, from one source. A European equivalent would need to handle inspection reports in 24 official EU languages with different terminology and formatting conventions. That's a technical problem with no cheap solution.

And there's no political pressure for it. The FMCSA grew out of specific high-profile trucking accidents and sustained public demand for highway safety oversight. Europe hasn't had that kind of concentrated political moment pushing member states toward shared carrier transparency. Nobody's marching in Brussels demanding access to carrier inspection data.

What European shippers actually use

If you're moving freight in Europe and want to evaluate a carrier, your options are thin:

• Trustpilot and Google reviews, which tell you about customer experience but nothing about safety
• National business registries, which confirm a company is legally registered but say nothing about operations
• Industry association directories, which are self-reported
• Personal networks and word of mouth

For parcel carriers like GLS, DPD, or DHL, there's even less to go on. These are large companies with reputations to protect, but their safety and performance data stays internal. No one outside the organization sees it.

Freight brokers and logistics managers in Europe still depend on personal relationships and long-standing partnerships in a way that US brokers increasingly don't have to. When you have access to data, you can evaluate a carrier you've never worked with in five minutes. Without it, you're calling people you trust and hoping they've had good experiences.

Why we stay focused on the US market

We built CarrierOwl because the FMCSA data exists and is rich enough to build something actually useful on top of. That public database is the foundation everything else sits on.

Could we expand to Europe? I'd want to, but the data isn't there. We'd end up aggregating Trustpilot reviews and company registration numbers, which is a completely different product with a fraction of the value. Knowing a carrier's FMCSA inspection pass rate or their crash-to-mile ratio tells you something real. A 3.8-star Trustpilot rating does not.

For now, the US is where the data lives, and it's where we can actually help brokers and shippers figure out who should be moving their freight. If the EU ever builds a public carrier safety database, we'll be ready. I'm not holding my breath on that, but I'd like to be proven wrong.