We buy trucks in Richmond

The Chevron Richmond refinery runs a crude capacity of 245,271 barrels per day, which is 16.54 percent of California’s crude oil refining capacity. A single site accounting for a sixth of a state that size is the kind of number that shapes every road around it.

Our sources do not fully agree and we are not going to smooth that over. One statement puts the same plant at over 250,000 barrels per day with 10 miles of railroad track for internal operations; another, in the same source, says crude arrives by marine terminal with no rail or pipeline delivery. Both are recorded and neither is reconciled here.

That capacity matters more than it did because the field has thinned. After Valero Benicia shut, this refinery and PBF Martinez are the only remaining Bay Area refineries turning crude into gasoline and other petroleum products. Marathon Martinez and Phillips 66 Rodeo have both moved to renewable fuels.

For a truck owner that is a change in what the local work is, not just who owns what. Renewable feedstock and finished fuel do not move in the same patterns, and the fleets that serve a converted plant are not always the fleets that served a crude one.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. The Richmond Pacific Railroad is a terminal line owned by the Levin-Richmond Terminal Corporation, working 2.5 miles of track inside the shipping terminal and wharves and serving industry on about 10 miles of track around the city. Its traffic is stone, ores, lumber, food products and petroleum products.

Five commodities that different means five kinds of truck: tankers on the petroleum side, dump trucks and aggregate haulers for stone and ore, flatbeds for lumber, box trucks and straight trucks for food, and day cabs moving between the wharves and the yards. Pickups and work trucks are here because they are everywhere.

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.