Sell your semi truck for cash in Woodhaven the easy and convenient way

Two rail-yard rows are attached here, both under Canadian National, 0.95 and 1.74 miles from the middle of town. The nearer one is Hayden Autoload, and the second word is the useful part: a finished-vehicle facility takes cars and trucks off railcars and puts them onto multi-car road trailers, so what works out of it is car-haul tractor-trailers rather than general freight.

The further row is doing the same kind of job under a name that does not say so. It carries a manufacturer-derived place name instead of a function name, so it is deliberately left out of the count of forty-five finished-vehicle facilities in this research — and recorded anyway, so that the state’s automotive rail picture is described completely rather than tidily.

That is a small piece of honesty with a real consequence. A count built from names undercounts, and anybody using it to say how much car-haul work a state has would be low. Its coordinate also falls outside any incorporated boundary; this was simply the nearest place holding a page.

Those car-haul trailers sit oddly against Michigan’s weight statute, and it is useful to say why. The state permits a maximum gross of 164,000 lb on a combination of up to eleven axles — the highest regularly usable truck weight in North America, with eleven the ceiling since 1967 — reached by allowing more axles each carrying less rather than heavier axles.

A loaded car hauler almost never gets near a number like that. It runs out of length and height long before it runs out of weight, so the headroom Michigan is known for is not the constraint on this particular trade. Useful to know mainly so nobody assumes the state’s reputation applies to every truck in it.

The seasonal rule reaches everybody, though. Axle and wheel loads are reduced through March, April and May — 25 percent on concrete pavements and concrete-based roads and 35 percent on every other road type — and no overweight permits are issued at all while the restrictions are in force.

On paper the rule is one sentence. We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Everything after that is a fix rather than a category: a lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

Gross and axle limits at MCL 257.722, read from the Michigan Vehicle Code and the Michigan Department of Transportation’s Maximum Legal Truck Loadings and Dimensions. Information, not legal advice.

Those rules cover trucks we are glad to buy. Car haulers and the tractors that pull them, off ramps like Hayden Autoload. Day cabs and road tractors off the general freight. Dump trucks off the road work, flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks and rollbacks out of the trades, and service bodies, work trucks and pickups off crews across Wayne County.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them — and a car-hauling rig is not a harder sale here than a pickup.

We can come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all — and you are welcome to bring it to us. Flat Rock, Brownstown, Trenton and the rest of Downriver are all routine.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• It is a car hauler with the decks still on it.Leave them on. Next to Hayden Autoload a multi-car trailer is an entirely ordinary thing for us to buy, and the decks and ramps are part of the sale.
• The truck is in Flat Rock, not Woodhaven.The record has the same trouble in reverse — a row filed under Flat Rock has its coordinate inside this town. Wayne County either way, and it has never decided anything.
• It has run loaded one way and empty back for years.Then the wear is uneven in a way the mileage will not show, which is normal on ramp work. Tell us the pattern rather than just the mileage.
• How am I paid?Cash or electronic payment. That is the whole list.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route.

None of those is usually the reason for the call. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and never got replaced. A car-haul rig standing on a Wayne County lot near the Canadian National rails 1.74 miles out, that has not moved since the work stopped and is still costing insurance every month.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.