Newbie pay question

don't they advertise starting pay of $52,000 a year average? it's extremely unlikely you'll drive 600 miles a day.

 

Keep in mind that any company and/or recruiter advertise numbers from a "perfect world" so take them with a grain of salt. With that said is it possable? Yes. But how likely will depend on a lot of factors like if your a first year driver or not.

 

Trying to understand this. Are you saying that flatbeds normally don't end up with that many miles?

I am about to choose a CDL school and/or an employer, and Maverick is one of the choices I am considering.

 

no what he is saying is that if you take perfect world numbers you will make what they say the "up to" figure is, there will be delays at the pickup and drop offs traffic, bad directions bad weather the list can go on. so take the "up to" with a grain of salt. run as hard as you can and you will make money just not as much as the recruiters say you can make. if you want to run flat beds mav is a good company to start with

 

I have been reading for a week now on this forum, and I am still not understanding the difference between driving flatbeds v boxes. I have seen people write about the probable loading and unloading when one is flatbedding, the constant tarping and untarping, etc.

Other than that, are there significant differences between driving flatbeds and driving boxes?

 

Well you could spend up to 4 hours tarping a load on a flatbed. It's a lot of work, don't be fooled. BUT, driving vans you may have more multiple drops or pick ups so there is a trade off. At least with a flatbed you'll probably have the same trailer all the time. Just more work because you have to tie down your loads all the time vs. just load and go (generally) with a van.

 

Is tarping, strapping and chaining the only real physical labor required of a flatbedder? NEVER load, or unload? How much do the tarps weigh?

 

Tee:

A vet on another thread (I am a newbie) just said today that the loading/unloading can often be done by the truck driver, but some locations will not let that happen because they do not want to give control of the forklift to a foreigner (truck driver).

So the answer to your question, from what I have read, is " maybe ".

 

I think _all_ truckers will tell you that 600 miles every single day is a pipe dream. I'm planned 3-4 days in advance with stacked pickups and there are some days I can only manage 400-450 miles due to varios reasons: Weather, delays at a shipper/receiver or whatever else you can imagine.

I drive 600+ miles A LOT of days but there are also some where I drive 400 and shut down. To get 600 miles or more every single day you'd have to have every single thing go perfect for you all of the time and that might happen in utopia but reality is far from that.