We buy trucks in San Diego

Naval Base San Diego is the largest naval installation in the Pacific and the second largest surface-ship base in the world after Norfolk, principal homeport of the Pacific Fleet with over 50 ships and over 150 tenant commands. That is the real thing, and it is genuinely here.

But thirteen separate rows in our data carry this city’s label, and they include a naval hospital, a recreation area, at least three parcels of one base, and a training centre that closed in 1997 and is now Liberty Station. A page built by counting rows would report thirteen installations. Nothing about freight follows from a hospital, and we are not going to write as though it does.

Those numbers sit behind a single thread. This metro is served by one Class I railroad over one coastal route, and the 2024 California State Rail Plan lists the San Clemente and Del Mar bluffs among its near-term sea-level-rise and coastal-erosion vulnerabilities.

When that line is interrupted there is no alternative rail route into the metro. How often it closes, and for how long, was not determined — so we will not put a frequency on it. What follows without any estimate at all is that freight which has to move on those days moves on a truck.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Day cabs and road tractors on the port and border runs, flatbeds and dump trucks on the construction side, box trucks and straight trucks through the distribution belt, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Those trucks meet very little in the way of posted structures. Within ten miles of the El Cajon Quarry, where MSHA records 5 employees, the 2025 National Bridge Inventory records 304 structures and not one of them is coded posted for load or below legal loads. The county posts one of the 206 bridges it maintains.

Read that as an upper bound rather than a promise: it is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and a tighter crossing can sit just outside one. But it does mean the thing shaping a truck here is usually the duty cycle and the heat rather than the route book.

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? However it goes, there is no clock on it: 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.