Fleet maintenance beats private maintenance
A utility or municipal fleet services vehicles on a schedule because downtime costs more than oil. Those trucks often show high mileage and a stack of records, and they are frequently in better mechanical condition than a lower-mileage truck owned by somebody who changed the oil when they remembered.
Ask whether service records come with the lot. On a fleet vehicle they usually exist.
Mileage means something different on a diesel
A well-kept diesel at 200,000 miles may be mid-life. The expensive questions are the emissions system — DPF, EGR and DEF components run into five figures when they fail together — and whether anyone has deleted them, which is both a legal problem and a registration problem in many states.
Check what was bolted to it
Trucks that carried a plough, a crane, a service body or a liftgate have frame stress, wiring splices and hydraulic plumbing the next owner inherits.
- Frame cracks or welds around plough and crane mounts
- Abandoned wiring harnesses and spliced-in circuits
- Rear springs flattened by years of overload
- Hydraulic lines capped off but still charged
- Rust where road salt collects: rockers, cab mounts, bed supports
From the auction floor
See how this works on a real lot.
Every listing carries its inspection report, its full specification and its bid history. Read one before you decide what it is worth to you.