Trans Am Still

Good luck to the new hires on the way to orientation. We all know in this industry, earning a profit on equipment as well as your miles driving is the way to go. The reason we don't advocate it with the TransAm lease program is the numbers just are not there. You are not earning on equipment with a TransAm lease. TransAm is keeping that profit as well as holding back some extra as a contingency.

Part of your completion bonus is not a bonus at all. It is in fact a refund of a maintenance account, money they took out of your base rate and hold it. It is more like a collected deposit on maintenance that you will get refunded if you should be fortunate enough not to have to use it. Some of the completion bonus is actually a bonus.

At orientation, they may tell you that you will make money on the fuel surcharge, you will not. The trucks would need to get an AVERAGE fuel economy of over 9 mpg for you to make money, the trucks to do not. You will pay out of your base rate for fuel, the part the fuel surcharge does not cover.

The equation to figure fuel cost per mile is - average price per gal / MPG that a truck uses. For example, my company T-700 gets an AVERAGE of around 6.4mpg for all operations. Example 3.61/6.4= .564 ... so with fuel priced at $3.61 per gal, my truck burns an average of 56.4 cents in fuel for every mile I run. Last time I checked, the TransAm fuel surcharge was more around 42-44 cents per mile range.

As others have posted, they will present you with a very pretty overview of the lease program at orientation, as others have posted, the devil is in the details.

 

Thanks passport that's all I been hearing her at orientation is lease lease lease. I believe I am going to be the only company driver

 

Stay strong my company driver brother! They start dropping like flies. New drivers looking dazed and confused and telling you they decided to go lease.

I was lucky my roommate was very sure he also wanted to stay company. We would tell each other "stay away from the darkside!". We figured on the final day, the owner of TransAm, Johnny would come to us and say "Driver, I am your father" but that did not happen.

 

Yea my roommate is going lease he says that's where the money is I'm like go ahead but in 3 months I will still be at TransAm and he will most likely be gone

 

Yeah, we had a friendly rivalry going back and forth between the lease guys and the few guys who held out and stayed company. I would put up my argument of what I thought was wrong with the lease. Talking in greater detail, actually looking at numbers. The lease guys would start to look sick. After awhile I just left them alone.

I was telling the lease guys they should be looking at maintenance records and fuel economy data when the picked a truck. Most only cared what color of truck they got.

 

This is something I poste in the old thread:

All the lease guys were starting a good natured rivalry. Giving us company guys a bunch of grief that we were suckers for not going with the flow and signing a lease. They kept it up until I had the following exchange with one vocal new lease signer:

Me: Keep your truck clean now.
New lease guy: huh?

Me: Keep your truck clean, I am not so worried about the outside but inside, keep it clean and nice smelling.
New lease guy: Huh, yeah, ok ... I will keep my truck clean ... but what the heck do you care?

Me: Because I am a company driver, I will never go broke and you will NEVER have to come and do a recovery on my truck but I just might have to come and get yours ... I like to drive a clean truck.

He shut up after that but frankly, it was not too hard to shut up the lease guys in the friendly rivalry. Most all of them looked a little bit shell shocked and not very confident in their decision to sign a lease.

 

Hey now, I recovered two trucks and BOTH of them were company trucks!

 

In a perfect world leasing is great but first show me a perfect world

 

They have a huddle house here in Bethel now. Not sure what it was before.