Trucking Digest

I’ve shown you the trucks that I bought in the previous Trucking Digest and I bet you’re asking – “When can I actually buy a Truck?” If some of the previous posts have seemed a bit non-committal at times, this one is going to ace non-committal🤣

There’s nothing to stop the eager new trucker from buying a truck after 4 or 5 quick jobs. By that point the bank will be offering you a loan and you can get out on the road in your own truck. Remember you’ll be repaying that loan out of your job earnings which will still be quite low. There is another issue with buying that early – All the trucks have a scale of improvements based on your level; take a look at this DAF for example…

…You’ll notice that the biggest cab option is locked until you reach level 12. Throughout all the in-game truck range, the most useful engines, gearboxes and paint schemes only start appearing around levels 10 and 11. If you really want that top of the range 750hp eight by four then you’re going to have to wait a lot longer!

To confuse things further, there is a key difference between Euro Truck and American Truck. In American truck Simulator all trucks you buy are covered by a maintenance insurance. It starts at $601 and decreases down to $200 as you complete your deliveries without having an accident. Unless you are deliberately driving into other vehicles at every opportunity, your maintenance bill is never going to be more than $200 over several trips. So you could buy a nice basic truck with the aid of a bank loan very early on and know that having an accident isn’t going to wipe out your bank balance. Euro truck, on the other hand, has no accident insurance. You hit another vehicle or a building hard enough and you can get bills of over €30k. Buying a truck and leaving yourself with just €10k in the bank is a huge risk. Therefore, before buying at any experience level, I’d recommend checking out the cost of the truck you are hoping to buy and workout how much cash you will have in the bank after you buy it. In Euro Truck, because of the risk of massive repair bills, I’d recommend holding off on your purchase until you know you will have a post purchase balance of at least €30k in the bank.

A final thought around gameplay – There’s nothing in game to prevent you buying a base level truck with a 340HP engine and then upgrading it as the parts you want unlock. Whether you choose to do this will come down to your approach to realism. In Europe and the US, the cab a truck is built with stays with it throughout its working life – A day-cab doesn’t become a sleeper. In Europe it’s very unlikely that a truck will get a different engine fitted – it’ll keep what it was manufactured with. In America, trucks in private hands do sometimes change engines. Also, in the past the truck manufacturers used to supply glider kits so that the owner could fit whatever engine and gearbox combination they wanted. That practise is now banned. So if you want to play realistically, you should buy the truck with the engine, gearbox and cab that you want. Of course, cosmetic items get added all the time once a truck hits the road – after all, you can never have too many lights!😂