Four numbers decide whether a truck belongs in your fleet, and they are all shown when you order one.
Range must cover the leg. It is the tank's range, not the driver's day — 600 km on a light van, 1,500 on a European tractor unit, 2,000 on an outback prime mover. There is no partial credit: a distribution rigid will not reach across a continent, and the game will refuse the departure rather than let you find out on the hard shoulder.
Gross combination weight must fit the limit at both ends, and this is the hard gate in the game exactly as it is in the industry. The EU stops at 40 tonnes, the UK at 44, the Netherlands at 50, Sweden at 64, Finland at 76, the United States at 36.3 — 80,000 pounds, federal law since 1982 — Michigan at 74, Canada at 62.5, Brazil at 57 and 74, and the Australian outback at up to 153. An HCT combination is legal in the Nordics and nowhere else. A road train turns around at the edge of the outback. A European 40-tonner does not belong on the American network at all. If your combination is heavier than the terminal allows, that leg does not exist for that truck, and no amount of money changes it.
Diesel per pallet-kilometre is what decides profitability, and it is why the truck list in this game is not cosmetic. Consumption alone is misleading — a road train burns around 80 litres per 100 km against a van's nine, but it carries a hundred pallets against four. What matters is cost per pallet-kilometre, and the truck reference ranks every type by exactly that.
Price is the smallest consideration of the four. A cheap old tractor unit that loses money on every load is more expensive than a costly new one that does not.
This game deliberately contains tired 1990s iron alongside the current order book, and it does not treat it as a trap. Half the world's freight moves on trucks older than the driver's licence of the person driving them, and a thirty-year-old tractor unit bought for thirty thousand dollars is a working business — that is why so many of them are still working.
What the old truck loses is efficiency, not viability. Its engine is a generation or two behind on thermal efficiency, so it burns meaningfully more diesel per pallet-kilometre than a current model on the same leg, and the workshop charges 25% more to keep it going. Buy one to get moving cheaply, or to put a second rig on a short local run where diesel is a smaller share of the bill. Just buy it knowing which half of the trade you are on.
A truck has a number of slots, not loads. Slots convert to paying freight at different rates depending on class:
| Class | Slots per load |
|---|---|
| Dry | 1 |
| Reefer | 2 |
| Special | 4 |
A standard artic with 33 slots carries 33 dry pallets. Fit 6 reefer pallets and you spend 12 slots on them — the unit, the bulkheads and the temperature log all take room — leaving 21 for dry freight.
The load bar in the game shows this directly: the width of each block is the slots consumed, so you can see what specialised capacity costs you.
Refrigerated capacity is genuinely scarce, which is why a reefer pallet costs two slots rather than one. It still earns more per slot than dry freight, or nobody would haul it.
Specialised freight earns far more per load. Reefer pays 2.6 times the dry rate while taking twice the space, so it earns meaningfully more per slot — when it sells. Special freight, meaning ADR chemicals, oversize and time-locked consignments, pays 5.5 times on four slots. The catch is in that last clause, and the reference rates in the game show you the ratio directly.
Reefer demand is a modest share of the market — larger on long legs between big terminals, small on short local ones — and special freight only exists between major gateways. Fit a reefer body for a short urban round and most of that capacity runs empty while still costing you the slots.
Survey the lane first, then build the trailer to the demand you actually found. A modest share of slots in reefer is a sane starting point on medium and long runs, and none at all on short thin ones, but the survey is what should decide it.
The layout is not fixed at purchase. A truck standing at its base can be refitted — same slot rules, 2% of the list price, and a day in the workshop while the body is rebuilt. Departures scheduled during that day are missed, so plan it like a service stop: in a quiet gap in the week, and preferably before you move a truck to a lane whose customers want a different trailer.
Trucks here do not age in years. They age in hours on the clock and in drops — one drop being one load and one unload — because that is how trucks actually age, and because it makes how you run a rig matter as much as how long you have owned it.
Two identical trucks bought on the same day can be in very different condition a month later, and the one that spent the month running city distribution is the tired one. Drops punish the hardware — ramps, tail lifts, air suspension dumped and raised at every dock, brakes worked cold — so a rigid making six drops a day wears faster than a long-haul tractor unit making one, despite covering a fraction of the distance. The game weights the two according to what the truck was built for.
Every departure adds hours, one cycle and some wear. Old trucks pick up wear faster than new ones, so age costs you twice: once in diesel and once in the workshop.
This one catches people out, because it is the only cost in the game that depends on your fleet as a whole rather than on the truck you are looking at.
Every additional family you operate — Volvo FH, Scania R, Cascadia — raises the maintenance cost of everything you own by 6%. Every additional model within a family raises it too, by 1.5%. The reason is the one that drives real hauliers to run a single badge: separate spare parts, separate diagnostic tooling, separate mechanic training, separate manuals.
A haulier who buys whatever the used market offers this week pays a premium on its entire fleet, permanently. One that picks a family and stays inside it pays the least. The factor is capped at 1.60, so variety never becomes ruinous — but it is large enough that a mixed fleet needs to be earning something for the trouble. Before ordering from a new family, work out what it does to the trucks you already have.
The fleet page shows your families and models as a number for exactly this reason. It is a cost you can only see by looking at everything at once.
You can name a preferred manufacturer in each size class — Van under 10 slots, Rigid 10 to 23, Artic 24 to 41, High capacity 42 and up — and take 7% off the list price and 5% off maintenance for that maker's trucks in that class. The choice is locked for 30 days of game time. It is a clean trade: a real saving now against a loss of flexibility later, and the flexibility matters most exactly when something goes wrong.
Two thresholds, both shown in the fleet list:
| Stop | Cost | Out of service | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service | Priced by slots and by how worn the truck is | 4 hours | Wear back to zero |
| Full overhaul | 10% of the list price | 36 hours | Wear back to zero and a year off the truck's age |
This follows the real pattern. A service is a working visit — oil, filters, brakes, tacho calibration, a day on the ramp. An overhaul takes the driveline apart and puts the rig back together: expensive, slow, and the only thing that makes an old truck young again.
The decision is when, not whether. Running to 89% squeezes the most kilometres out of each stop but pays the rush surcharge the whole way; servicing at 50% wastes money on downtime you did not need.
Reefers, heavy haulage outfits, car transporters and livestock decks are a category of their own in the truck list, not expensive artics. They cost far more per slot to buy and to run, and their reward is that they take freight nobody else can take: a reefer holds temperature for a fortnight of chilled produce, a lowloader on twelve axle lines carries a transformer or a turbine blade, a stinger deck drives its cargo aboard on its own wheels.
Treat them as a specialist tool. They will not fill themselves — the lanes that pay for them are the ones where reefer and project demand is genuinely thick — but on the right pair they earn per slot what no dry trailer can.
A reefer also runs its unit at three to four litres an hour on top of the diesel, day and night, standing still included. That is the cost of the cold, and it is charged whether the trailer is moving or parked over a weekend.
The catalogue also carries tippers and tankers, which have no slots at all. They carry in tonnes: aggregate, grain, fuel, ADR chemicals, milk, timber, walking-floor loads and cement powder.
A slot in this game is a unit of revenue, not a physical pallet, and for specialist outfits the two are not the same thing. A car transporter really does take eight to eleven cars — but a car deck earns roughly what a dozen pallets of general freight earn, not what a full trailer earns. The game has one tariff per slot, so the truck is listed at the number of slots its freight is actually worth.
The same conversion is why a lowloader shows 16 slots for a hundred-tonne combination. Its real weight is unchanged and is still what the diesel model burns fuel against; only the revenue side is restated. Without it, project haulage would have been the most profitable work in the game by a wide margin — purely because one indivisible consignment is far lighter per slot than a full deck of pallets. That advantage is real. Being paid pallet rates per axle line for it was not.
The tankers are the same conversion running the other way. A 26-tonne ADR chemical tanker is listed at 78 tonnes of capacity, because a parcel of chemicals pays about three times what a tonne of grain or aggregate pays, and the game has one tariff per tonne. It is the only reason anyone would pay 238,000 dollars for a tanker instead of 145,000 for a grain trailer of the same size.
Trucks are registered automatically as your fleet code plus a sequential number: SK-001, SK-002, and so on. The number is assigned when the truck is bought and does not change.