My Prime student-to-lease experience

Just wanted to drop in again and say that the $3500 figure I'm throwing out is EVERYTHING each week. Truck, fuel expenses, all these balances they nickle and dime you with, etc. I really did not prepare myself to sign up for some "You are your own business" kind of situation and it definitely affected how I drove at certain points. I just wanted a truck that was in decent shape, to get paid weekly, run, get home time, and I would have been fine.

Instead this Lease program they have was the best option considering that piece of garbage they showed me, dead on arrival, having to get it jump-started twice to move it around to the inspection bay.... Give me a break!


All in all what I'm asking myself now is, "If I went company instead, would I have made more money?" About $1200 a week, no expenses, no repair costs, no "Surprise! We took 3x as long to do some simple fix on your truck!" sort of stuff, AND THE BIG ONE:

A different dispatcher!

I. Just. Hate. That. Guy. I hate him so much. He'd do this whining thing where he'd sound like he's on the verge of tears and say to me, "WELL WHAT'S THE PROBLEM MAN!?!?"

I'm just thinking, "Man, I dunno, it was the slight back-up of traffic for 2 hours on I-44. So I've been awake for 16 to 18 hours roughly when you account for the time I woke up... I regularly drink coffee, so caffeine doesn't affect me as much now... The last rest area was full... If I stop here I can get up earlier, I'm tired, and blowing the 2 hours I have left will be only around 120 miles AND I'll get my 10 hour finished at a later time... I mean, I tried to save time by taking a break while I'm stopped in traffic on the interstate which is a no-no..."

I'd just say, "I dunno," because I know how he is. He'd want another fight there too. "Well what you could have done is this, and what ya did do is this, and if ya did what I WANTED instead, you'd be there on time... I'm not comfortable with you hauling our freight."

Yeah. Great guy. I just like the difference between when I met him and how he was at the end there.


I just knew! I knew with every fiber of my being that dude was running his mouth about me at the water cooler. "Yeah! Well, I got this one driver..."




PS
Somebody mentioned those sensors not being a problem? Right buddy. Tell that to the next guy pulling out of a rest area in some remote place where the pavement is warped.

The problem is you can ALWAYS blame the driver. It's so easy to just say, "Well, this things a computer and you're not. It CAN'T make mistakes, and you did. So..."

So I'm with this new company. They have dashcams. They largely leave me alone. I'm coming up to stopped traffic over a hill I can't see or I just need to do a doubletake. I pump the brakes and come to a complete stop. I get a warning saying the event is being recorded because of the abrupt stop.

Not once did I get some condescending phone call saying, "So... You stopped too quickly and you should have stopped slower. Because you stopped too quickly, this is considered a critical event. So what I'm gonna have to do is put this on your record here at Prime, and if this happens again, we'll need you to come in for a safety meeting." Nothing happened. They left me alone. Crazy stuff.

 

There were plenty of people I'd listen to going on about how they were going lease through my time there, but I was never sat down with someone where they tried to convince me to go lease a truck from Prime. It was stuff like when I was taking the shuttle back to the hotel in SLC, one day a lease driver was talking about how much better it was being able to run 65 in a lease and take time off when he wants. A few other people here and there said things like that too. Another guy bragging about his 2019 Peterbilt in the shuttle from Springfield terminal to the hotel. That was while I was just boiling over with anger after being told off by the girl at the lease desk. A few others here and there that just mentioned they were doing the lease thing.

Basically how things went was I wanted company, I went to the desk. She hands me my keys and says, "It's back by the detail shop." I get to that area and can't find it. I ask someone inside and she just points me to right behind the shop. Thing wouldn't start up. No crank, no nothing. I ask my former trainer and he says, "Oh sorry you got an International, those things are pieces of..." Yeah, so I learn they didn't even have an off switch for the batteries, and I just knew I'd be at a truck stop getting jumped in the morning for a few weeks to come because just charging the batteries on the truck would be a lot easier than testing them to see if they hold a charge, then pull all of them out, then replace them. Lotta money involved in one and not the other. I'm sure those guys have their hands full, so I turn the truck off and go to ask for another....

She says, "I don't have any more trucks to give you. That's all I have. It will take too long for another truck to come in. So just take that paper to bay 47 and bring up all those things with them." So I go back to my truck (think I racked up 3 or 4 miles of walking that day lol), get it jumped again, move it over to bay 47 and head inside. That lady says to me, "You're supposed to do that inspection." OK, so I inspect it. Fully and completely as I learned how to do. Anything I didn't like:
- No sleeper curtain, and windshield curtain doesn't close completely. No, I'm not bobby-pinning it.
- Tire tread worn down below SLC tire foremans specs on drives.
- Sleeper airbags are dry rotted.
- No way to secure load locks. Literally no shelf unit for them.
- I saw there wasn't a white box that I believe is an antenna that every other truck had.
- The bed is lopsided.
- The interior stinks like cigarettes.
- The cupholders in the sleeper have goop in the bottom of them (Really all interior parts in used trucks there had this weird goopy feel to the plastic, but the cupholders had like tobacco or something in them).
- The batteries keep dying.
- There are no cabinets in the sleeper (International lightweights also have nearly no room between the bed and seats)

I'm sure there was more, but that's what I remember. I hand it in, she looks pissed, I don't care, I hop on the shuttle and later that night when I'm doing laundry I meet someone. I head in there and there are two guys talking about what they want to do. They ask me. I mentioned all of the above and the older guy says, "Man, that truck sounds suspicious! 180,000 on a 2015 truck? I think that might have been in a wreck or somethin'." Yeah, the mileage was weird. So the other guy shows me his Peterbilt, mentioned it's a walk-away lease (probably the best part of the leasing at Prime), and then I switched to lease the next day.

Came back into the leasing office with an LLC and a Business bank account and we went from there.

Edit:

So if the driver is the problem always, can I blame Prime for everything, always, if I make a mistake? 'Cause they trained me and all.

 

Ya know, I think Prime would LOVE you. You gobble up all their crap and only ask questions when it benefits them. Keep driving the cost of freight down man, the mega carriers need more people like you.

 

I just feel like if I show 1 image to you, then after you tear it apart from every angle possible, soon you'll be demanding latitude and longitude coordinates to where, when, and what I did at what time so you can break all that down as well. To flex those super trucker muscles some more. Yeah, I washed the truck. You don't know whether I had 1 bug on the windshield or drove through 2 feet of mud, had 3 birds nests in the engine bay, and 12 cat turds on the wipers.

From the posts I've seen around here "Axe to grind" is exactly what the section is for. "Axe to grind." Yeah, do you say that in every YouTube comment section of channels like Trucking Answers? Axe to grind is a good thing for drivers because it shows we actually have standards for how we run and we won't just eat whatever pile of $#!7 is plopped in front of us.

YOU think I'm being unfair to little ol' Prime. Well... They're also a multi-million dollar company bringing in new drivers every single day. How much impact do you think 1 guy saying their lease program sucks online, on 1 forum is going to affect them?

I imagine most people would be like, "Hey, I'm still going lease but thanks for the heads up."