New Truck Delivery Delays - Seeking to Temporarily Rent/Lease Truck

Is there any reason in particular it needs to be a new truck? Right now it would make a lot more sense to go after a used pre emissions truck and just rebuild it especially with the ongoing parts shortages. Would likely be much cheaper as well with new truck prices hitting 200k+. You could pick up something like this https://www.commercialtrucktrader.com/listing/2000-KENWORTH-W900L-5019285163 drop 50k for a transmission engine and rear end rebuild and maybe 10k more for a paint job and have a good long runner for half the price of new and without any of the hastles of emissions garbage.

 

I am afraid short term leases like that would not be possible for a new authority without auto liability insurance in place which is needed for the authority to become active.
In order to get insurance you need to have a truck first.

Besides, what do you mean by pulling a load whatever you choose?

Do you have a source of your own loads lined up directly from a load factory and the only thing you are missing now is a truck and trailer or are you confused about how loads are found and booked?
If the latter then a broker is a person who facilitates the choosing of a load you want to pull.
Either way, this is always a contractual process. You don't go around a warehouse area and try to get randomly loaded, like a taxi driver tries to find a client around an airport. Those direct shipper loads most of the time require certain commitments that a solo owner operator might find difficult to meet.

 

Good luck even finding a rental. You may be surprised to hear you aren't the first person to think of renting one when they can't find one to buy.

Even when there isn't a shortage, a new truck on a dealer lot is built to a big fleet spec and probably not ideal for most small or one truck outfits. The usual buyer is the otherwise regular big fleet that has an immediate need, and they don't care since they aren't the ones driving it. Same thing applies to rentals. The trucks are usually off lease big fleet trucks that have been run hard and put up wet. Less than ideal, and usually minimally maintained. They will also serve their regular customers before jumping thru flaming hoops to find a truck for some random guy off the street.

The first problem you may not be aware of is: you have to insure it. Someone like me with an existing policy emails his agent with a vin and value, and I'm supplying a certificate in minutes. You will have to start a new policy, which is usually a week or longer process. I'm not even sure how that would work with a rental being the one and only first unit you insure. You better be calling insurance agents to line that up before you find a rental truck.

ETA: This may be your deal breaker. If you're considering starting out with a rental truck as an independent, then you can't get your authority active until you have insurance. You can't have insurance until you have something to insure. A chicken/egg problem. If you're leasing on with a carrier, that's a little different but also somewhat complicated. Your carrier will have to establish the rental in most cases. This could go either way. A larger carrier may already have rental accounts established and really grease the wheels on the process. Or, it could be someone who's never rented before and you're back to square one, only depending on someone else to be involved with you doing all the legwork.

To get a rental lined up all you can do is call around and ask. Renting a semi normally involves opening a credit line with the dealer, and they all have different qualification requirements. That can take days, and is best done when you don't need one right away. The account is needed due to them needing to invoice you periodically to keep up with mileage, and also settle up fuel taxes after you return it. Sometimes that can be a month later. That's where you run into a time in business issue. It's not like car rentals where they'll work with anyone that walks in with a credit card and ID. Check with dealers, they all have in house rental departments. If your user name is an indication you're in St. Louis, that's MHC territory and they rent trucks. I've dealt with several and MHC has been the best to work with, even if they sometimes offer a less ideal truck. If you were ready to buy with cash, you probably have a large cash deposit to offer, which will be favorable. Most of the smaller rentals will require it, or at least a card with enough overhead to run a deposit and charge a weekly invoice.

You may find this surprising, but I disagree with some others that have suggested rehabbing a pre-emissions truck to achieve this. In my opinion, that only works when you have sufficient mechanical knowledge to know what you're paying for, then are either doing it yourself, or have already established a working relationship with a trusted service dealer. A project like this is a great opportunity for an unscrupulous dealer to separate you from a lot of money, and most of them are unscrupulous. They'll see you coming a mile away. If you're not that guy, or have already got a trusted service shop lined up via someone else you trust with experience, don't do it.

I'd recommend getting a new truck order in and just wait it out. Meanwhile, let it be known to a short list of new truck salesmen you're a cash buyer and keep at least weekly contact with them to see if they have potential incoming trades that you can jump on. If they call, be prepared to immediately post a cash deposit, sight unseen, or you'll miss it. On the used side, I wouldn't look at anything older than a 2017 unless it was pre-2003. If the used one comes through, you won't have any problem dropping it on the market when the new one comes in, and probably get all your cash out of it, or more.

 

Newer low mileage trucks have been showing up at auction. That’s about your only option right now unless you can get on a list at a dealership and wait for a cancellation.

 

On the new vs used thing there is one thing i wanted to point out especially for "new used i.e 2017 or newer lightly used" is that it is just as easy to be screwed there and easier in many cases then rebuilding old. While it IS a valid point that without knowledge of what your getting yourself into its quite easy to be screwed on a rehapping project especially if you for example buy a truck such as i posted kick the tires then send it down the line. Who knows whats wrong and double down if it has emissions on it.

However, the advantage of rehabbing an old pre emissions rig again using the one i posted as an example for ease of argument. They are vastly easier to learn then a new truck is. A 3406E is a fairly simple engine and a rebuild for them is well documented with a casual youtube serch showing vids such as this one haveing entire series on the process with multiple diffrent engines, the whys and hows. And its not hard to do a modicum of research to learn what to look for on everything from the nose to the tail and tires to roof.

There is also the advantage that parts are widely avalible even on the second hand market if you need to slap a used power steering pump on to get through a rough patch for example. On new trucks this is far less true. The systems are far more complicated usually locked behind systems like davie 4 that require tens of thousands to have full acces or thousands to even look at codes to know WHAT code your truck is throwing and parts are hard to find especially new so even if you have a warranty you could end up with a yard queen for weeks or months at a time or require expensive tows dragging it all over gods green earth to find someone to work on it (*cough* paccar *cough*) Normally i would point out payments are an issue here but if he is buying in cash its really not in this case.

Next as to shops again true to an extent but there are also many shops such as garners diesel which have a generally very good reputation and are fairly honest even if the old saying "trust but verify" applies to ANY shop. And is just as true for a new truck hell likely more so. If it goes down due to a defect in the emissions system then sure its under warranty. But how many dealers and shops have we heard of that will use that as an excuse to bilk a customer and shotgun parts at the thing until the light stays off for a test drive, rather then diagnose it only for the truck to go right back to the shop after a hundred miles for another shotgun parts session. Meaning rhe convoluted emissions systems and hard locked computers can make it vastly more difficult or outright imposible conpared to a pre emissions rig to diagnose yourself even with a passing or hell a good knowledge of engines.

New rigs are a double edged sword just as much as a rehab. Sure the odds of them being borked right out the gate are fairly low if a bit higher now with the shortages letting iffy parts past quality control, but we see it happen to far too many people to ignore that it happens and it does need to be taken into account. Not to mention new trucks are more and more locked down making later upgrades or alterations harder.

 

@Arctic_fox you're sort of driving my point home.

What I was getting at is: A first time truck buyer truly doesn't know what they don't know yet. I fancy myself as fairly smart and mechanically knowledgeable, and still either consistently got less than ideal service from dealers, if not outright burned, for at least the first 2-3 years in business. It didn't matter how carefully or not I went about it. It takes experience to know what to look for and who to go to, and there isn't a good substitute for that. Disagreement even exists among people who do know what they're doing, so phoning a trusted friend isn't a sure thing either. Everyone goes through the learning curve. The rare exception being someone that grows up in a family of truckers, or a farm or the like, where big truck repair/maintenance is an everyday thing from an early age.

A major restoration is not the job to learn those expensive, school of hard knock lessons with in my opinion. Even if the finished product has the perk of being more DIY friendly and more reliable in some regards.

 

Also a fair point but id argue you also drive mine home as well on why old can be better. I think we are barking up the same tree but disagreeing on if the cat or squirrel are more tasty here. Im not going to say which is better. As i said near the end of my last post the cons of new need to be considered just as much as the pros.

The thing with old iron especially for a new driver is that its cheaper and easier to work on especially with a full rehab and is a LOT more forgiving in many ways on a good deal of those hard knocks and also is a lot easier to learn from said knocks or to find information about those knocks and turn them into misses or glanceing blows. The downside is you need to do a fair amount of legwork and learning, there is also the fact old iron is starting to go to the wayside so the longer you wait the harder it is going to be to find experinced persons for said iron evem if there id still an absolutely massove base of mechanics that know how to work on them and a vast number of shops that can do it. There is also the upside they are easy to modify or upgrade as your needs require.

For new as you said it can be forgiving and is less likely to go wrong right off and give you time to ease into the flow of things while having a small safety net in terms of warrinty. However, the downside to new is the raw costs involved can be sky high and anything going wrong with new is going to be a swift kick face first into a lava riptide by a pissed off demon with a stick ip the ### in terms of cost, lack of ability to even learn the system, lack of parts, and how locked down a rig is now making upgrades or alterations very difficult. It can also lock you into a only new cycle and make it hard to step away from.

Both have pros and both have cons. In MY opinion the old iron is far more flexable and gives you more room for error especially in the OPs case as he has the cash for a new semi outright. Old iron will be cheaper and leave him a massive maintaince fund after. It also has the upside of being much easier to walk away from. Old iron will always be in high demand and flipping a rehabbed w900 for cost will be a song and a dance to pull off. But the new trucks are a mostly safer initial path with a heavy risk as the downside as time goes on. They are far less likely to break down but when they do the costs are several times that of old iron and flipping a used emissions truck even with our current prices is going to be a pretty big loss no matter what which can make it quite hard to just walk away and is a big downside to a new O/O as you can easily get trapped.

But i will only give information to go off of. Its entirely posible to succed or even thrive with either option. But its also quite easy to crash and burn either way as well.

 

Freightliner dealer in Canton Oh has 6 new trucks for sale