Our First Truck

I’ve suggested previously that before taking out a loan and buying our first truck for our new company, we need to have a fair amount of money in the bank. The reason for this is the ongoing risk of fines and damage to the truck / cargo. So, how much of a balance do we need? I reckon around €70k is a good figure. I’ll tell you a cautionary tale from a couple of weeks back in my main profile which will serve to illustrate why I’ve set that figure so high.

I was doing a delivery of Metal Profiles to BKP in Strasbourg. The site is quite restricted when parking so care is always needed but I can usually park the trailer successfully. On this occasion for “Dinner’s on the table” reasons I decided to go with the option to auto-park. Normally this works fine as the game places the truck in the easy parking slot and you get no XP for the parking. Now whether it was because I had a non-standard trailer in tow (one of Jazzycat’s creations) or for some other reason, the game glitched. The trailer tipped on its side and my truck wound up on its roof. When the dust had settled I was left needing the truck recovered. When I went to the repair screen the cost of the work was over €59k! That was a game glitch and a very rare event but a head-on collision at speed can result in repair costs around the €40k mark and you do meet ai drivers on the wrong side of the road 😉 So that’s why I’ve recommended having €70k in the bank.

The seven jobs that I reported on in my ‘Earning Money’ post had netted €40k. It took 5 more jobs to reach the magic €70k and to illustrate the point of the risks in the game a couple of them were not incident free…

 

Route	Cargo	Fines	Notes
Hannover – Helsingborg	Peugeot 208 cars	€ 369	DAF XF 105; Collision on autobahn – car hit rear  of trailer while changing lanes – no fine. Scraped trailer on gate at Billia. Either could be cause of damage to cargo – €369 damage fine.
Helsingborg – Olsztyn	Watermelons	€ 240	MAN TGX XLX; Car turned left in front of me in Karlskrona – unable to avoid despite having slowed down for the junction.  Not my fault – stupid manoeuvre! – but I get fined 😦

…These are very minor fines and just an annoyance but I trust the point has been made!

But we reached the grand total of €72,424 in the bank with our twelth delivery which terminated at Goteborg. That was a handy location because I had decided to buy a very basic Volvo and they have a main dealership there (as well as making them too!) So a trip to the bank for a €100k loan and then to the dealer to customise our truck. Don’t forget that the object of the exercise is to buy the truck for as little over the €100k loan amount as possible because we want the bulk of the bank balance to be there in case of accidents / glitches. The other objective of this series is to aim for a realistic company fleet so this first truck will be the commonest type – a 4×2 chassis. The rest of the truck followed what I believe to be current fleet practise. I opted for the standard FH Sleeper Cab and the Volvo D13K 460HP Euro 6 engine. The gearbox is the iShift 12 speed with a retarder and I opted for a differential ratio of 2:85. I went for the cheapest paint job – choosing Traffic White. The only indulgence was fitting Michelin tyres (which are not cheap!). The final cost was €103,308 leaving us with most of our €70k balance intact. Just a quick note – when you buy your first truck you are automatically relocated back to your garage (which in my case is Lyon).

I started this series after responding to a request on the players forum regarding fuel economy and realism. So, it’s time to do the first job in our new truck and see whether our choices have produced a fuel efficient truck.  I took a load of Cottage Cheese into Switzerland…

Route	Cargo	Wgt	Dist	l/fuel	lphkm
Lyon – Zurich	Cottage Cheese	18t	409km	108.6l	26.6

…Now 26.6 is an impressively low consumption figure with an 18t load on a route which included some slower roads.  I’m amazed at how well the philosophy has panned out!   I think I was quite lucky with the traffic and I know there will be harder climbs to tackle but all-in-all this has been a successful experiment.  I think the best fuel economy have previously recorded was 27.9 and that was with a much lighter load!

Now we have to earn lots of money to pay back the bank and upgrade our garage.  I leave you with a shot of our first truck catching the evening sun on her way to Zurich.  She’s not very pretty but our company accountant loves her! 🙂