As a company driver, what driving habits should I develop before buying my own truck?

[ChrisP94]

(04-11-2020 )Rawze Wrote:  Assuming for a moment that you are not actually trying to troll my forum...

It sounds exactly like your fighti9ng against a horribly spec'd truck that is governed wrong to boot. Not much you can do except maybe drive it a gear down and see if it will let you get up into the 1600+ rpm range when climbing hills. If the engine will not let you do this, then you are not going to fair well no matter what you do, because what your doing is killing that engine to an agonizing slow death by lugging it everywhere all the time in the bottom 1/3 of its actual working range.

As well, practising better management of time = higher profitability, so that you can slow down a bit, save fuel and wear, etc... and still get there on time.

Learning how to own a piece of equipment is also vastly different than learning how to drive it efficiently. Owning equipment = working on it yourself as much as possible as well. Otherwise your giving away the bulk of all the mo0ney you earn every time that CEL light comes on, or something happens.

Although it is a bit dated material... Read my Book. Link at top of page.

Yeah our company video on being fuel efficient literally tells us to ignore the truck shaking it’s not bad just keep pushing it down to 800-900rpm up I-77.

I am experienced on the mechanical side of things I’ve just never driven them. But know when something is wrong and the way they trained us to drive these trucks just feels wrong. I’m burning through a gallon of oil every 10,000 miles or so and see visible leaks where I see gaskets have given out I don’t think from temperatures but just from the sheer amount of pressure built up and vibration this motor has taken for 360K miles. And no service has been done to it everything is still factory Cummins red the last oil change and air filter replacement was almost 150K miles ago now.

I’m looking at lease options for a used truck but I feel like they will have the same treatment as this truck received so I am considering to just lease a brand new truck through the company with a X15 and Eaton Endurant 12 speed automatic.

I was just hoping there was something I could do to improve things right now because it truly sucks driving this turd.