Newbie question about equipment.

Excellant question........

 

Drivers can ##### about bad equipment all they want, but when they are too lazy to write the equipment defect up, or they go ahead and leave the yard with a defect...The break down is on them.

 

Not that I'm aware of. But I can tell you this. Its been my experience that if you pay attention to other trucks on the road, you will notice that with some companies you almost never see trucks rolling with obvious defects such as damaged fenders, duct taped mirrors, bent side steps etc. While you will see those sorts of defects running on some trucks from other companies.

Pretty much without exception if you look into the company that you notice has almost no defects, you will find that they don't hire drivers with less than 2 or 3 years of experience while the banged up truck companies hire those with no experience.

That alone tells me that the quality of the equipment and the ability of the equipment to keep you rolling is far more dependent on the driver than on the company.

That also tells me that as a new driver, you should be prepared to spend your first few years in beater trucks or at least in the more 'broken in' examples of the companies fleet. Get the beater truck down the road and back for a year or so with no additional damage and you might then find yourself in something newer and/or nicer.

But as far as trends for mechanical breakdowns go, i.e. stuff that's not driver inflicted, I think its pretty much a toss up. All the larger national carriers tend to keep their fleets at 5 years old or newer. So if they put you in dud that breakdown a lot, chances are you'll be able to get yourself swapped out of it sooner or later. Sooner if you're nice to your boss, later if you're not. For the smaller mom and pop companies, you might find older equipment. But as the company is smaller, they have less ability to put up with excessive downtime. Remember when you're not making money, neither are they. So if they have a real problem truck in the fleet, it tends to not last long as it gets to costing them too much in downtime and repairs. Obviously there will be exceptions but quite frankly I think there are lots of more important factors to pay attention to than this when choosing a company.

 

Breakdowns are the least thing you have to worry about for downtime . You'll have more downtime being delayed at shippers/receivers or waiting for a new load when you are empty . You need to know how many miles drivers are averaging a week with carriers .

 

Most large carrier fleets run late model equipment, and trade the trucks every 3-5 years, depending on the trucks mileage. Downtime associated with breakdowns will be the least of your worries as RickG said. Within 6 months of being a rookie, I had a truck with 60,000 miles on it.

 

We are ran that way. They only pay once a month to have equipment washed but if somethings broke it gets fixed. Just gotta put money where it really matters.

 

Alot of the breakdowns you will have will be tire failure, which sometimes can be avoided with a good pretrip. If the recap is coming off and you are loaded heavy, you can expect the tire to blow at any time. Or, if the tire pressure is really low. You call the company maintenance and they will direct you of how to deal with it. Most of your miles will most likely be on the interstate where there are shops. The worst ones are when you are out in the middle of nowhere.