What are these trucks for?

They are expedited freight. Generally they run teams and get anything to anywhere asap without a plane.

 

They're the ones who couldn't back a trailer............

 

Custom Critical,is if a company needs something delivered ASAP!! and will pay to get it shipped IE(Emergency shipping) that's what i was told.but i work for Fedex Ground and deliver to houses.

 

As Richter said, we deal in expedited freight. "Hot" or last minute deliveries. FedEx CC and Panther are two of the bigger companies. Majority of the trucks are O/O. Some guys own their trucks, some drive for fleet owners. Some, like myself, drive a company truck. It's nice in the sense the lanes aren't dedicated and you can really see a lot of North America. I just had a post entitled "My First Year of OTR" that dealt with life as an expediter. And losttrucker, I could back a trailer. With a little bit of practice that is...

 

I know, was just waaaay to easy to let it slide by lol

 

I've hired a few of those during my 30 year hiatus from trucking. Let's say you need to deliver high quality shopping bags to a trade show in New York and they are being printed in China. Everything is hunky dory, on schedule, shipped on time, but the shipment got "rolled" in Taiwan.... "rolled" means the normal transfer from one container ship to another got delayed by a week because there wasn't enough room left on the Los Angeles bound ship...

.... Doh!

Now you are JIT (Just In Trouble)...

.... if you are late delivering to the trade show you just ate all the cost of those shopping bags because they were printed specifically for the show. Once the show starts and you don't deliver you also lose a longstanding customer...

... so the normal 3 week transit to put the container on rail to New York and clear customs there and make local LTL delivery is no longer going to work. You put in a frantic call the the freight broker, change customs clearance to Long Beach and arrange standard LTL trucking... whew! Only $1200 more expensive than the original method...

... then customs decides to put the container into Intensive Exam... and takes another 10 days to get the freight available at a bonded warehouse in Long Beach...

.... duh ta ta DAH!

Expedited Freight to the Rescue!

Saved the customer and lost all your profits on that order...

.... dang!

 

.... good one!

But, as I understand it expedited drivers make as much or more than most truck drivers. Ever price out one of those rigs? They're like $240K.

 

Well shoot guess you'd better slap FedEx custom critical on the side of my truck sounds a lot like my job...I'm even a team operation. I drive while me sits in the passenger seat and myself sits in the bunk sleeping. Yea works pretty darn good. Lol.

 

I wondered what those trucks were for, I saw my first one when I bobtailed at a petro in Vegas, he crammed himself next to me using several bobtail spots.