Buying a Fleet truck from mega carrier

One of the fleet owners that's leased on here recently bought a fleet truck from McKee foods (Little Debbie) here in Chattanooga. It's a '12 Volvo with ~625k on the clock. McKee included a warranty in the purchase price. It had a dpf issue a couple of weeks after he bought it and McKee's shop replaced the dpf unit at no charge (the truck was down 2 days). It's ran great ever since. I believe he paid about $25k for it.

 

Fleets are all about numbers, buy the truck as cheap as you can, and run it until it becomes a liability instead of an asset is they way most fleets operate, so if it's for sale it's because the numbers stopped working.

 

The Truck Paper has many dealerships that handle fleet trucks.

https://www.truckpaper.com/

 

I wouldn't buy a fleet truck from any of the ones you listed. Look at how they treat the truck when they own it.

Look at fleets that take pride in there equipment and show that they do everyday, not just on the sales lot. Fleets like TMC, Maverick, and Prime. I know Prime has there own dealership www.pedigreetrucksales.com

Truck's from swift, Schneider, Werner are going to be cheap and all, but you get what you pay for with those.

 

I think it would be wise to buy a fleet truck only if they had a apu on it. Idling a truck all night really clogs up the emissions system even worse. At least the trucks with apu's ought to be in better shape.

 

I bought a truck from Schneider truck sales & I don't regret it. I've had it for a year & I've put some money into it but I expected to. If you buy a used truck from anywhere without expecting to put money in it you're fooling yourself. My truck is a 2011 Cascadia that had 725,000 miles on it when I bought it. It was a team truck at Schneider. I paid $28,000 for it. When I was looking at trucks I saw other trucks for sale that were the same age & similar mileage but they were $10k higher in price. I also wanted a truck that was California compliant but without DEF.

Either way you go you really need to have a mechanic check the truck out, have it dynoed (sp) & pull an oil sample. I don't know about the other manufacturers but with a freightliner you can call the dealership with the vin & they can give you a warranty report of all warranty work done. I'm sure most fleets are like Schneider & you can get the maintenance report from them as well.

After all that's done, it's a good idea to have a minimum of $10k left over in the bank for repairs & such.

 

All of the Pedigree stock is manuals. Does Prime have any auto trans trucks?

 

They have a few here and there. If you call them they can usually get you what you're looking for. They don't have there entire stock online. You'll start seeing more and more automatics I think starting next year.