Wear, hours and overhauls

Trucks in The Trucking Tycoon 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 the way you run a rig matter as much as how long you have owned it.

The practical consequence: two identical trucks bought on the same day can be in completely different condition a month later, and the one that spent the month on urban distribution is the tired one.

Hours and drops

A long haul accumulates hours and one drop. A short local run accumulates few hours and one drop. Since the drop is the punishing part for the hardware — the tail lift, the air suspension dumped and raised at every dock, cold brakes, the trailer reversed onto a ramp — a rigid making six drops a day wears out faster than a long-haul tractor unit making one, even though the long-haul truck covers far more distance.

The game weights the two according to what the truck is. Vans and rigids are built for frequent drops and suffer less from them than a road train would; a 76-tonne high-capacity combination run on short town legs is being used against its design and the wear reflects that.

Wear

Wear is the running condition of an individual truck, and it rises with every departure. High wear does not make a truck unprofitable in a subtle way — it makes it unusable: past 90% the truck is off the road until it has been serviced, and no departure will be accepted.

You will see this coming. Wear is shown per truck in the fleet list, and planning a stop before the truck stops itself is considerably cheaper than discovering the ceiling on a busy week.

The workshop

There are two kinds of visit.

A service resets wear. It is the routine one: oil, filters, brakes, tacho calibration, four hours on the ramp, and the truck comes back fit to work. Budget for these; they are part of the cost of operating, not an emergency.

What it costs follows three things, and none of them is what you paid for the truck:

The size of the truck. The bill follows the slots. A 72-slot HCT outfit is a bigger job than a van, and it is billed like one — more axles, more brakes, more couplings to inspect.
How worn it is. A stop at 30% wear costs half what a stop at 60% costs, and a service on a 33-slot tractor unit at 60% runs to about $600. There is nothing to do on a truck that has just left the workshop, and it is free.
How long you left it. Above 70% wear the price rises by 2% for every further point. Deferring a stop costs more, not less — which is why running a truck to the ceiling is a decision and not a saving.

Older trucks carry a 25% surcharge on top of all three. The premise of the whole fleet page is that cheap old iron is cheap to buy and dearer to keep going, and the workshop bill is where you feel it: a tired 1990s tractor unit costs more per departure in maintenance than a current model does, despite costing a fraction as much to buy. That is a trade, not a punishment — plenty of profitable hauliers run exactly that way.

A full overhaul is the heavy one. It resets wear and takes a year off the truck's effective age, which is the only way to make an old rig young again. It costs a tenth of the list price and it takes the truck out of service for thirty-six hours. Whether it beats selling the truck and buying a newer one is a genuine calculation, and it depends on what the truck is worth on the used market at the time.

Workshop visits take real time, and in a scheduled week that time is loads. You can let the auto service rule catch a worn truck whenever the threshold you set is crossed — same price, but whatever was in the timetable right then is missed — or you can plan the stop into the week grid yourself, in a natural gap, and lose nothing. The rule is the safety net; the planned service block is the craft. A workshop of your own shortens every visit.

The maintenance factor

Here is the part that catches people out. Your maintenance costs do not depend only on the truck being maintained — they depend on how varied your fleet is.

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 same one that drives real hauliers to run a single badge: separate spare parts, separate diagnostic tooling, separate mechanic training, separate manuals.

So the haulier who buys whatever the market offers this week pays a premium on its entire fleet, forever. The one that picks a family and stays inside it pays the least. The factor is capped at 1.60 — variety does not become ruinous — but it is large enough that a mixed fleet needs to be earning something for the trouble.

This is why the fleet page shows your families and models as a number rather than burying it. It is a cost you can only see by looking at the whole fleet at once.

Preferred suppliers

You can name a preferred manufacturer in each size class and get 7% off new trucks and 5% off maintenance in exchange for committing to them for thirty days of game time. It is a straightforward trade: a real saving now against a loss of flexibility later, and the flexibility matters most exactly when something goes wrong.

Practical notes

Plan services; do not react to them. The cheapest moment is earlier than it feels, and the price curve above 70% wear is steeper than it looks.
A distribution truck's real cost is in drops, so a schedule of very short legs is more expensive than the diesel bill suggests.
Before buying a truck from a new family, work out what it does to the maintenance factor on everything you already own.
An overhaul on a much-loved old rig is sometimes sentiment. Check the used market first.