Every pallet slot you sell is sold to somebody, and not everybody wants the same thing. The Trucking Tycoon splits the customers on a lane into five kinds of shipper who look at the same rate, the same rig and the same firm and reach entirely different conclusions about whether to book with you.
That split is why there is no single right rate. A rate that fills a trailer on one terminal pair leaves it half empty on another, and the difference is not the distance — it is who does business at either end.
Space on a truck is sold in three classes, measured in EUR-pallet slots, and they take different amounts of it:
Nothing on a trailer gets a better journey for paying more. A reefer pallet buys a compressor, a bulkhead and a place where the driver can check the temperature; that is all. Premium on the road is scarcity, never service, and the page you are reading never pretends otherwise.
Before the list, one thing worth saying plainly: these are cargo owners, not passengers. Nobody aboard is having an experience. A customer here is a company with freight and a date, and every one of them is more price-sensitive than any airline passenger ever was, because a pallet is a pallet. Even the most time-critical client in this game has a price elasticity of 1.0, where an airline's first-class passenger had almost none.
Spot shippers care about one thing. Their elasticity is 3.2, the harshest number in the game: they compare your rate against what the lane ought to cost and walk away from an increase nobody else would notice. They book one load at a time, they never ask whether you run again next week, and they have never heard of your firm — nor does it bother them. If your strategy is volume at a low rate, these are your customers, and they are loyal to exactly nothing.
Contract shippers buy a slot on your weekly loop — same day, same ramp, all year — and they are the closest thing to a foundation this business has.
Frequency matters to them more than any single thing matters to anybody else in the game. A scheduled lane is not really a series of runs; it is a promise that there will be a truck on Thursday, and if one departure is missed a factory somewhere stops. That is the entire reason a haulier signs annual contracts at all, and it is why a contract shipper will stay with a competent firm for years at a rate barely above reference.
They notice a shabby tractor not at all. Nobody has ever turned down a load because the truck was registered in 2004.
Retail chains are moving goods against a shelf date. What they are buying is not comfort — there is no cabin to improve — but reliability: cargo that arrives intact, on the day it was promised, with paperwork that clears the border. They pay a little over reference for it and they will drop you for a firm they have never heard of if yours does not deliver it.
Of everybody on this list they are the most sensitive to whether they have heard of you, for the simple reason that they have the most choice. Thirty hauliers can move a pallet of furniture.
Long-standing accounts choose a haulier before they choose a departure. Reputation is the single biggest thing in their decision, and awareness comes close behind. They are the hardest group to win and the most valuable to keep, because they are the only ones still there after a competitor undercuts you.
Time-critical shippers are pharmaceuticals, fresh produce and fashion against a season. They pay half again over the reference rate, they judge reliability harder than anyone, and they need reefer or special capacity that actually exists before they will look at you at all. They are the only customers who notice an ageing vehicle, and for a concrete reason rather than a fussy one: a twenty-year-old refrigeration unit is a genuine risk to a trailer of vaccine.
Here is the asymmetry worth learning. Because so few firms can handle what they move, they are less put off by an unknown name than the retail chain is. The narrower the requirement, the less it matters who you are. They are a small share of most lanes and a large share of the revenue on the ones where they are present, and reefer capacity running where they are not is the most expensive empty space in the game.
The mix in November is not the mix in February, and the shape of the year here has nothing in common with an airline's.
A haulier's high season is October and November. Everything destined for a Western shop shelf at Christmas has already landed by then, and it has to get out to the distribution centres and the stores by road. Black Friday week is the absolute peak of the road freight year. Rates climb, everybody wants trucks, and the spot market swells — in a peak month the spot shippers can be a third of the lane.
Two smaller peaks sit ahead of it. August and September are the harvest, when the crop has to come off the fields and into the silos, and the summer is the building season, when aggregate and materials move in volume.
The floor is January and February. The shelves are full, the building sites are standing still and returns are about the only thing rolling. In those months the contract shippers are most of what is left, and the lane runs because they are on it. It is the clearest illustration of what contracts are actually for.
None of this changes how much freight exists — that is the survey's business. It changes who the freight belongs to, and therefore what rate the lane will bear that month.
The five groups are not secret; the page you are reading describes them. What is secret is the mix — what share each group holds on a specific terminal pair. That is what a survey sells you.
The mix shifts with the lane. Two industrial regions with heavy trade carry time-critical shippers and long-standing accounts in numbers a thin rural lane never does; the rural lane carries spot shippers who would not have booked at all at a higher rate. A short cross-border run between neighbouring cities is full of contract shippers. None of this is derivable from the map, the terminal sizes or anything else visible in the game, and it is deliberately not published here.
The reason is simple: the survey is the best mechanic in the game and it is worthless the moment demand can be worked out on paper. So the wiki tells you that spot shippers react harder to an increase than long-standing accounts do. It will never tell you how much harder, or what share of Rotterdam–Gothenburg they represent.
A firm nobody has heard of is not the same as a firm with a bad reputation. The first is invisible; the second is known and avoided. The game tracks both, and awareness is per lane, not per company.
You build awareness on a lane by running it. Run it regularly and shippers at both ends learn that the service exists and that you operate it; stop running and the knowledge decays. A brand new lane at a brand new firm starts from nearly nothing.
Awareness does not touch everybody. Spot shippers and contract shippers do not care whose name is on the trailer doors — the cheapest space at the right time is the whole decision. Retail chains care somewhat. Long-standing accounts care enormously: an unknown haulier loses them almost entirely, because loyalty to a firm you have never heard of is a contradiction.
This asymmetry is the shortcut a discount operator gets. If you compete purely on rate, you can grow without ever building a name, because your customers were never going to choose you for it. The price of the shortcut is that you are permanently locked out of the customers who pay the most.
See also The economy, Lanes and operations and Reading your numbers.
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