My 4 Month Review of Schuster

There are some O/O’s in old fleet trucks that look almost identical. Only difference is they don’t have the flag/stripe decal. Some of those are 5+ years old though.

and there are some drivers that take no pride in keeping their trucks in good shape here. Not my cup of tea, but not my business. I’m sure the mechanics notate it when they’re in for service, so they’re only hurting themselves in the long run.

If anyone sees a Schuster fleet truck out though, the second number in the truck # is the model year. So 33xxx would be 2023, 24xxx would be 2024, etc. And then just the basic 140,000 miles a year calculation will pretty well tell the mileage lol. Just got done getting the truck greased at the terminal and there’s nothing older than a 2023 in the line of bobtails.

 

As far as personal updates, just been the typical runs for me, except I went to Hunt’s Point on NYE. Made it out of the city at 3pm with no stop and go traffic. I don’t know the science behind that, but that was the easiest NYC pay I’ve received lol. Nebraskaland had me unloaded in an hour and a half too. Went way better than the horror stories I’ve heard. Sometimes luck ends up on your side in trucking. Not often, but sometimes

 

As far as I’m aware, everyone in this thread is happily employed elsewhere. And definitely not denying that you might’ve had a bad experience. All I can do is give my personal experience and say that the high mileage truck issue from the past is no longer. International isn’t ideal, but they’re X15 trucks, like the typical Pete and KW fleet trucks, with an APU, and they undergo regular grease and services. Beyond that, it’s up to the driver to not neglect and to maintain a clean ride. There’s a free wash bay at the terminal and shop has been quick to address any issues I’ve had the same day. If someone’s not reporting weird behavior from the truck, not maintaining, or being rough on it, that’s on them. I haven’t personally seen any breakdowns on 29 or US20, but I’m sure there have been plenty, being that’s our primary running lanes.

Not a perfect company, but a company that can average 2800-3200 miles a week, pay decent, and do so with respectable equipment is pretty solid, given the times.

They hire with 6 months of experience, fairly lenient, and a many decades old company. Will Robert with 20 years experience find himself living the dream here? I don’t know, probably not. Will the new driver with 6 months experience at CR England averaging 700/wk take home find it to be a good experience? Most likely.

With all the horror stories on the “Report a bad company” forum, I feel like Schuster at least qualifies as reputable. I consider them great, but that’s my biased opinion.

And no, I don’t chase referral bonuses. I just like being able to go back and read what I was up to however many months ago, and give info to anyone searching up info on here, since that’s how I found them to start with

just ask @bryan21384 . I’m as whiny as can be lol

 

Gotta get my whine session in today:
eSmart, the governor system, decided they wanted to revamp and apply an update to every single truck running eSmart.

How it was a few days ago:
-3 over using the pedal
-Would let you set your cruise at 2 over the speed limit
-Would you let roll up to 5mph over downhill before it’d auto-engage your Jake, or cut fuel completely if you had your Jake turned off. What I’m going to say probably will sound confusing, but when it does that, it makes you slow to 3 under the speed limit before it’ll let you continue like normal. I’ll just call it the ‘reset’ to keep things short. Having cruise control on overrides this though

How it is now:
-pedal only does the exact speed limit
-cruise can be set 3 over the speed limit
-the ‘reset’ happens at 1 over the speed limit if you don’t have cruise set

The main problem is that adaptive cruise is the typical adaptive cruise nonsense. One dodge caravan or a Cascadia gets over within 5 seconds of you, and the adaptive cruise kicks in and makes you lose 3+mph. The next part of it is that now that the ‘reset’ speed is below cruise speed, you can’t override the adaptive cruise with your foot until it drops all the way down to 2-3 under the speed limit. And then once it does that, you can only use the pedal to speed back up to the exact speed limit until whatever Caravan or Cascadia is 7+ seconds ahead and not triggering the adaptive cruise.

So here’s an example that happened multiple times today: Random four wheeler blows your doors off and gets over 4-5 seconds ahead in a 65mph zone. They start fiddling with their phone and slow down from doing 70+ to 62. The adaptive cruise kicks in and slows the truck to 62 from the 68 it was set at. You use the pedal to override it and can only do 65. Random four wheeler doing typical four wheeler things isn’t going to care or have any idea, so now you’re either forced to try and repass them or sit there doing 3mph slower than intended until they get bored and take off again 10 minutes later. Just to add a little extra irritation, you accidentally ran down a hill at a whopping 66mph for 2 seconds. Now the truck is throwing on your Jake and forcing you to slow down to 62mph before it’ll let you continue to 65mph. Anyone that’s driven US20 in Iowa knows that 68 is an extremely reasonable speed lol.

Once that exact situation happens for the 27th time in a 5 hour span, you do start losing a meaningful amount of time.

I should also add that when you’re in a 70mph zone now, the pedal only does 68 instead of 72. So at this point, I went from being able to average the speed limit to being slower than the average Schneider truck by the time you factor in all the other nonsense.

If this sounds like some convoluted, preschooler, robotic BS, it’s because it is lol. It’s a shame too because it was actually a very seamless system that was a good balance between driver’s time and keeping everyone within a reasonable speed at all times. And now it’s basically choosing between sanity and averaging 30 less miles a day, or it’s making 147 lane changes to not get screwed by every slight hiccup by other road users as far as maintaining speed goes.

And before this is taken as a Schuster problem, they do not have any control over those parameters. All they can do is set the truck’s max governor while using the system, which is 73mph. Apparently I and about half the fleet complained and they sent the feedback to eSmart, so we shall see if it improves.

Thank you for coming to the Thrasher Whine and Cry Corner

 

It worked pretty smoothly beforehand because it was pretty much just 3 over up to 72 and don’t bomb hills, which was reasonable IMO.

I’d take a flat 68 over the current setup now, even though we can technically do 72 on cruise. For other people’s sake, as well as our sanity, would be much better being able to drive one speed that flows as expected and not randomly slowing to 62 at the bottom of a hill, but it is what it is

Hopefully the eSmart folks will take into consideration. I was shocked when I found out those aren’t parameters that are controlled by Schuster