We buy trucks in Soquel

Olive Springs Quarry Inc carries eight people on the MSHA roll and sits 4.13 miles from the centroid of the CDP the row is filed under. Within ten miles the National Bridge Inventory records 144 structures, of which eight are posted for load and seven coded below legal loads — and all seven are county-maintained.

Seven in 144 is 4.9 percent, against 1.4 percent of structures below legal loads across California as a whole, and the nearest of them is 6.95 miles out. The lowest operating rating among them is 8.4 metric tonnes; the lowest that clears the 11.0-tonne weight of an empty tandem dump is 11.3, about 12.5 US tons. Over that tare, the cap admits roughly 0.3 tonnes.

Whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Capitola, Aptos and Scotts Valley carry pages of their own if the truck lives closer to one of those. The mix around here is small-scale and coastal: box trucks and straight trucks on delivery, flatbeds and day cabs between the yards, dump trucks on the rock side, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Those numbers come off one road. NBI records 37C0507 and 37C0508 both carry Aldercroft Heights Road over Los Gatos Creek, both county-maintained, a quarter of a mile apart, rated 11.3 and 8.4 metric tonnes. The lower one does not take a commercial vehicle at all. The upper one takes an empty tandem dump plus about three hundred kilograms.

So that road is shut to a loaded truck in both directions by two structures over the same water. The 0.3-tonne payload is the second tightest this survey has published in 1,520 rows, behind only the nodes whose floor is exactly 11.0 and admits nothing at all. A quarry eight miles away in the next county reads the same pair and returns the same floor — the same two bridges, not a coincidence of ratings.

Both counties are sparing with postings even so: this one posts three of the 82 bridges it maintains and its neighbour ten of 162. This is a mountain road system where a county’s few restrictions happen to cluster, inside the state with the lowest overall restriction rate the survey has measured.

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.

That same code book handles what damage does to a title, and California is unusual in how it does it. CVC § 544 defines a total loss salvage vehicle as one that the owner, a leasing company, a financial institution or an insurer considers uneconomical to repair, and which is consequently not repaired. There is no number in the law.

Most California insurers work to internal thresholds of somewhere around 70 to 75 percent of actual cash value. Those are company policies, not statute, and they must not be read as a legal threshold — the same damaged truck can brand in Kentucky, run a formula in Georgia, and be a judgement call here.

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.