Listen to some of the veteran drivers here like Rick G, Lavender and Texas Nana they will give you some good advice and you will need it. School has not prepared you for what you will face on the road.
That reminds me of a funny story. Four or five years ago when Swift was hauling cars, they would sometimes get behind at the end of the month. They would call in 8-10 Swift flatbeds to haul three cars on their trailer. These guys would park all by themselves in a corner of the port. Their cars would be parked in the north lot and they would park their trucks in the very southwest corner of the load line. These guys would hump it 500 yards instead of parking with all the other car haulers. They would also walk around like they were God's gift to steering wheel holders.
A friend and i are considering team driving for SWIFT, according to the recruiter we will be paid .32cpm but we will split that between the two of us. so it is .16cpm per driver. can someone explain me how are you supposed to survive with .16cpm or am i missing something here??????? I am a newbie at the end so maybe someone will be able to paint the big picture to me............. Thank you in advanced.......
You get .16 cpm for all paid miles to the truck. So you get .16 cpm while you sleep and your friend drives. Just to clarify, say ya'll drive 5000 miles in a week. 5000x.32= $1,600 then you guys split that so $800 a piece. Or, you can just say they're paying you .32cpm.
Was that on the state test???? How bout that Nana lady wanting to throw stuff at people! Not very preacher like of her!
He didn't ask that lol. He asked what the pay structure is. I honestly have no idea what teams are getting now, but the math is what it is. But any good team will have to live close to one another (or even be married) IMO for it to be worthwhile outside of being a trainer unless they just never go home.
It really depends on whether you get on a company team or owner operator team. I just got off an O/O team truck running the o26 transcontinental account. I was making $1000-1500 / week. Not bad for a first year driver IMO. We both ran pretty hard though. We averaged around 6k miles a week. We would have run more but weather didn't always co-operate. He was paying me 40% of the trucks net. You only need your HazMat endorsement to qualify but you had better not have anything against New York or California as you will see a lot of them. Typically we just bounced back and forth from coast to coast every 2 days. The biggest challenge in running team is getting along with your co-driver. In that small of a space even your best friend gets on your nerves eventually. I left to preserve my sanity. I love solo driving but I think it takes a special kind of person to run team successfully for any length of time.
