We buy trucks in Fremont

The vehicle plant here holds 5.3 million square feet of manufacturing and office space and more than 10,000 employees. Two acreage figures are on the record and they do not reconcile into one site area — 370 acres for the site, and 210 of NUMMI’s 370 as the parcel purchased — so both are recorded rather than averaged into a tidy number.

The site was NUMMI, a Toyota and General Motors joint venture from 1984 until the General Motors bankruptcy in 2009, with production peaking at 428,633 vehicles in 2006 and 5,500 employees that year. Tesla bought the property in 2010 and the first production Model S rolled out in 2012. Installed capacity is reported by the company as more than 550,000 of two models a year plus 100,000 of two others — reported installed capacity, not measured production, and current output was not established.

That scale of plant needs vehicles taken away from it as well as parts brought in, so car haulers and rollbacks are ordinary sights on these roads in a way they are not in most cities of this size. Whether the outbound split favours rail or road here was not established and we are not going to guess at it.

Beyond the plant the East Bay lanes are ordinary and short. The Port of Oakland is about 25 miles north, and the local runs either cross the bay bridges to the peninsula or go south into Silicon Valley.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. At the other end of the scale from the car plant, Sheridan Quarry reports 3 employees to MSHA, working industrial sand, with Stevens Creek Quarry as operator of record. California’s industrial sand sits inside its metropolitan areas in a way no other state’s does.

That changes what the truck does. It is short-radius delivery into construction rather than long lease-road running, so the liner, the tailgate seal and the hoist pivot wear, abrasion is constant, and the brakes, clutch and tyres carry it while the odometer reads low. A low-mileage end dump out of a city pit has worked harder than its mileage suggests.

The rest is what a large suburban city puts on the road: box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, flatbeds and day cabs between plants, and pickups and work trucks everywhere. One rail row filed here actually falls inside Newark, which carries a page of its own.

That is state law rather than anything local, and it is the rule truck sellers misquote most often. CVC sections 35550 to 35558 set a statutory range of 34,000 to 80,000 lb by axle count and spacing, and § 35551(a) is a table rather than the federal Bridge Formula — no formula is declared in the statute at all.

The California table does not exactly match the Federal Bridge Table, including at three and four axles. So a configuration that is legal under one can be over under the other, and “it makes bridge formula” is a claim about which table you mean. If someone has told you your truck makes it, that is worth knowing before you repeat it.

Does it have to run? No. But we buy complete trucks — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. A missing bumper is nothing.

Do I need the title? We need a title, unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. If it is lost, that is a replacement through the DMV and we will walk you through it. If there is a lien on it, say so on the form — that is why the question asks whether the title is in hand rather than whether you own the truck, because those are different situations and they go different ways.

What if it has been in a wreck? Tell us what happened and we will look at it as it is. California sets no percentage: CVC § 544 makes it a judgement about whether repair is economical, so nothing is decided by a formula before we have seen the truck.

How does it get collected, and how am I paid? There is no clock on any of this. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.