two day cabs in one month: a 2021 Pete 579 bought blind on a sealed bid, and a 2020 Cascadia off a dealer lot

four trucks now, counting the two this thread is about, me and three drivers. almost all of it is containers in and out of Garden City Terminal with a couple of runs a week up 16 to Atlanta. in june a forwarder i do steady work for picked up a second steamship line and asked if i could cover eight more turns a week. so i went from two trucks to four, with about five weeks to find them.

i bought one off a lot in Pooler that i can drive to in twenty minutes, and one blind, sealed bid, through M&A Auto Sales, which i never laid eyes on until a driver backed it through my gate. same month, nearly the same money, two completely different ways to buy a truck.

i get asked which way is better about twice a week now, so i am going to put both of them down with the real numbers. what i am not going to do is tell you the lot in Pooler took me for a ride, because they did not. i have bought from them before and i will again, and by the end of this you will see why.

truck A, the one i never saw. 2021 Peterbilt 579 day cab, MX-13 at 455, PACCAR TX-12, 311,480 on the dash in the m&a listing photos. the bank had taken it back and it was sitting in a yard outside Austell when i found it. my winning bid was 57,200.

truck B, the one i drove before i paid for it. 2020 Freightliner Cascadia 116 day cab, DD13 at 410, DT12, 338,900 miles, used truck lot off 80 in Pooler. they asked 63,900, i paid 61,000 plus a 425 doc fee.

paperwork, condition, money, downtime, one post at a time as i get a night free. ask me whatever, including the stuff that makes me look dumb, because there is some of that in here.

paperwork first, because that is where the two ways to buy are the least alike and it is the part people get scared about for the wrong reasons.

the lot in Pooler: i signed four pages at a desk, they ran the tag off their own terminal, i handed over a check, and i drove the Cascadia home that afternoon. twenty five minutes inside the building. the doc fee pays for those twenty five minutes and i understand that line better now than i did in june.

the blind side. your bid is a single figure in a sealed envelope, nobody tells you what the other bidders offered, and second place never gets published. you can raise your own figure any time before the lot closes, and i did, from 55,000 to 57,200 on the last morning, because i sat in my truck in the yard and talked myself into it. the invoice came out at the bid, flat. there is no buyer's fee bolted onto the end, which is the part that honestly surprised me, because the physical auctions i used to go to in Atlanta took their ten percent off the top and smiled at you.

i wired the money on a monday. nine days later the packet came in the mail: the Georgia title with the lender's lien release stamped right on the face of it, and a one page bill of sale naming the broker out of independence as the seller's agent. the clerk at the Chatham County tag office turned the title over twice, asked me who m&a was, went and asked somebody, and then plated it. my apportioned plate was a transfer off a truck i sold in april, so that part was nothing.

what i will give the blind side on paper: the title was clean, the lien was already gone, and i never had to chase a bank. what i will give the lot: if you want to be working tomorrow morning, drive to a lot.

one honest thing while i am here. this was not my first bid. in may i put 61,500 on a 2022 T680 day cab sitting at a yard near Indianapolis and lost it. what comes back is one line telling you the lot went somewhere else, with no figures in it anywhere. you do not get to find out whether you were two hundred dollars light or nine thousand, so there is nothing in it to learn from and nothing to adjust next time. if you are the sort who has to know, that will chew on you for a week.

condition, both trucks, and the surprise did not land where everybody in this thread expects it to.

the Pete came off the truck on a thursday morning, eleven days after my wire cleared. M and A quotes about two weeks to the door and it beat that. Austell to my yard is 265 road miles on their sheet, and the first thousand are on them, so the freight line came back at nothing. i read it twice and then called to make sure i had not misunderstood something.

what was wrong with it. all four batteries were flat and would not take a charge, 672 for a set of group 31s. the two inside duals were at 3/32, legal by a hair and no good to me on a container truck, 530 for a pair of retreads mounted and balanced. the air dryer purged like a nail gun every forty seconds, 96 for a cartridge and an hour of my saturday. the annual inspection sticker on the door post was fourteen months old so it had to see a shop no matter what, 180. the passenger side hood mirror arm is cracked and i have not touched it because it does not look at anything i need to see.

call it 1,478 and a saturday. and no, jr, nobody looked at it for me, and you are right that somebody should have. they told me on the phone i could send whoever i wanted to the yard on my own dime and i decided sixty photos, a cold start video and a walkaround with the hood up were enough. this time they were.

the Cascadia, the truck i walked around and drove and crawled under in a gravel lot in Pooler: nothing at all for six weeks, and then a filter that would not come clean on a parked regen. 740 to get it baked and blown, plus a hub seal weeping on the right rear that i caught on a yard walk, 310 with the shop's labor. so 1,050 at week six on the truck i inspected myself with my own two hands and my own flashlight.

money, all in and ready to load. Pete 58,858. Cascadia 62,475 with the doc fee and those two repairs. the gap after everything is 3,617 and change.

the other thing worth saying: there is a thirty day window on the m&a side to send a truck back if what shows up is not what the listing said it was. mine was what the listing said, so i never used it, and i want to be clear that dead batteries on a five year old truck that sat all winter is not misrepresentation. that is just a truck that sat.

fuel, nine weeks of it, both trucks on the same turns, and i swapped the drivers twice so it is not one man's right foot doing the talking.

the Pete, MX-13 455 and the TX-12: 14,310 miles, 2,425 gallons, 5.90 by the pump. idle sat at 31 percent, which is the gate line and not the engine.

the Cascadia, DD13 410 and the DT12: 13,880 miles, 2,435 gallons, 5.70. idle 34 percent, because that one draws the Chatsworth runs and waits longer.

two tenths. at 3.60 a gallon and 60,000 miles a year that is about 1,300 to the Pete, which is inside the noise of which truck happens to get the heavy boxes in a given week. do not buy a truck on two tenths.

weights, for Memphis. the Pete scales 17,920 with aluminum wheels and a single 120 gallon tank. the Cascadia is 18,560 with steel wheels and a tank on both sides. that 640 pounds is worth more to me than the fuel difference, and the Pete has the heavy flooring containers now because of it. rear ratio on the Pete is 3.36, which is what i would have asked for if anybody had asked me.

downtime, which is the part of this that actually decided anything. the Cascadia loaded the morning after i signed. the m&a truck was thirteen days from the wire to its first container: eleven waiting on a driver to bring it across the state, two in a shop for the annual and the tires. if i had needed a truck that week instead of that month, blind was the wrong answer at any price.

terry, the driver question. my oldest driver took the Pete the day it rolled in and has not gotten out of it since. he says the TX-12 holds a gear in the queue better than the DT12 does. he may have decided that before he drove it, and i am not going to argue with a man who shows up every morning at four thirty.

update, and it is a bill rather than a happy ending. friday the Pete lit the dash with an outlet NOx sensor at 331,600 and told me a derate was coming in 200 miles. the dealer over in Garden City got to it tuesday. 590 for the sensor, 280 in labor, 870 out the door, and it has run clean since.

here is the piece anybody reading this before they bid should sit with. the limited warranty on the blind side is six months or ten thousand miles. that truck turns 7,500 miles a month in the port. i was out of warranty in six weeks and it never did anything for me, so the 870 was always going to be mine. if you run two thousand miles a month on a local truck, six months is six months and that is a real warranty. if you run a truck the way i run a truck, read it as a ten thousand mile warranty and price the truck accordingly. that is not a complaint, it is arithmetic i did not do in june and should have.

grain, your question. november i go back to m&a and bid on something, and the reason is boring: 3,600 is real money, the title came clean, and i have four other trucks so i can afford to wait eleven days for one. the week i cannot wait eleven days, i will drive to Pooler and pay the doc fee and be glad the lot is there. it was never really about which way you buy. it is about what week you need the truck.

what i do differently next time. send somebody to the yard. not an inspection outfit with a forty page report, just a mobile tech with a meter and two hours, two fifty or so, to load test the batteries, pull the wheels off the mud and look at the drive tires and the drums. that one phone call turns my saturday into somebody else's tuesday.

the listings roll over every week or two so there is no sense in me telling you what is sitting on there today: mandaautollc.com. both trucks are loaded this morning and the mirror arm is still cracked.