Crete advertises top 50% of their drivers average $96,0000 a year. Is that true, what u earning?

But if your foot is already on the brake...then you have to release the brake pedal and then hit it again...boy, that's safe. Should be a simple sub-routine to write... both brakes released, and foot on the brake pedal should disable the shutdown...but we're talking Freightliner here, the same company that can't make changes to an opti-idle system that has been around on their trucks for decades without screwing it up, or can't program their forward facing crash radar to detect when a vehicle is pulling away at a speed faster than the truck can go and not beep.

 

You definitely have a point about freightliner! Never had opti idle before but I've dealt with the shutdown timer.

 

I just started 2 weeks ago, first check was little over 1800 before taxes. Just did 3800 miles my second week so my check Thursday will be 2300 before taxes. So if that keeps up it'll be around 100,000

 

I know a Crete driver. He makes fine money, but his truck is his life. He gets the standard crap home time of one day off, for 7 days out. That's crap.

 

It's actually 1 for every 6 days out, but that's really not a big difference.

 

Even though the figures cited here in the title are two years old, I can GUARANTEE that figure to be incorrect! Crete Carrier is one of the most patently dishonest companies I've had the misfortune of dealing with. They are likely adding the so-called "value" of their benefits package to the salary figure and trying to pass it off as legitimate. It's what they do. You also need to remember that Crete will almost always have you fueling twice on one trip, and on a dispatch that usuallly should just require one stop. If for some reason your truck breaks down, good luck trying to get that $15 detention pay promised to you in orientation. And if you are able to drive over 2500 miles on a weekly basis, for just how long can that be accomplished without getting burnout?? For most of us, not very long. You could probably get yourself a better "deal" down at the Sbarro buffet on the Interstate. Not to mention the 401k downright stinks.

 

No offense intended, but if you're an OTR driver and can't handle 2500 miles a week without burning out, perhaps a regional, home weekly is more your speed.

 

You certainly could argue that 2500 miles over the course of 7 days is not a difficult task. Let's see.....divide 2500 by 7 and you get approximately 357 miles per day. Ostensibly not too difficult and if you did that 51 weeks per year, you'd end up with 127,500 miles. Tell me how many Crete drivers finish up a year with that amount of miles. But trucking is about the "long game." A career in truck driving is a marathon and not a sprint, and that's what a good percentage of new drivers don't understand. And, of course, you realize that driving 10 and 11 hours everyday gets you up to that 70 hour limit right quickly. Factor in mandatory 36 hour breaks every 8 days, and then the numbers start shifting.

As it just so happens, I did drive regional for Crete for a few months. If anything, the pace on the Northeast Regional account is higher than it is for OTR. I was granted 2 days off on the weekend, which I preferred, but it came at a cost of taking mostly the minimum 10 hours of off duty every day. And if the dummies in the safety department decide to put a camera in your truck, there's literally no way to reconcile that pace with the outlandish expectations of those couch potatoes back in Nebraska who don't even know how to drive a truck. They simply watch videos all day and defer to the proscriptions of the SMITH System, etc.

But the arithmetic I found most interesting goes as follows: $96,000 divided by 52 is $1846.15. I can't recall the OTR rate off hand, but if a driver put in 2700 to 2800 miles a week, I guess it's foreseeable that a driver COULD make that much money annually. But as I just stated, I did drive for Crete briefly and most of those individuals I saw sitting around inside of the terminals simply were not the road warriors that CCC claimed them to be. And over 50% of their entire OTR fleet???? Puh-lease.

 

At 60 cpm, a driver would have to run a little over 3000 miles every single week to make that money. It ain't enough freight to accomplish that for every driver.