We buy trucks in Beaufort

There is a single record attached to Beaufort in our data, and it is the Port of Morehead City, operated by the State Ports Authority in Carteret County.

It was assigned here by the narrowest margin we have ever recorded. Measured from the row’s own coordinate, Beaufort’s centroid is 1.78 miles away and Morehead City’s is 1.83 — so the wrong answer won by 0.05 miles, about 260 feet.

Everything else pointed the other way. The row’s own name says Morehead City. Morehead City is a separate place carried in the same batch. And a second row 0.4 miles down the water, the Phosphate Company terminal, is assigned to Morehead City. A geometric tie-break inside a rounding error overrode an exact name match, a neighbouring row’s assignment and the operator’s own naming, and none of those signals was consulted.

That record belongs to Morehead City by every measure except the one the resolver used, and 260 feet is not a reason to write somebody else’s freight onto this town.

It leaves Beaufort with no industrial record of its own that we hold, which is better said plainly than dressed up. There is no quarry here in our data, no rail yard, and therefore no ten-mile bridge count to quote — and no county figure would exist either way, because North Carolina maintains no county bridges at all.

What this page can do instead is set out what actually decides a sale, which is the same in Carteret County as anywhere else in the state.

So the rules that do bear on a truck here are the state’s, and they apply on every road in it.

N.C.G.S. section 20-118 sets 20,000 lb on a single axle and 38,000 lb on a tandem, with gross weight varying by axle-group distance up to 80,000 lb. The tandem figure is the one to notice. Every other state we have read carries 34,000 lb there, so North Carolina allows four thousand pounds more on a tandem than Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, Ohio or Pennsylvania. On a dense load that is the limb that binds, which makes an identical 80,000 lb ceiling mean more here than it does elsewhere.

The same section grants a ten per cent tolerance on axle-group weights, and then writes down exactly what the tolerance does not reach: not the single-axle limit, not the tandem limit, not the 80,000 lb gross, not a posted bridge, and not the interstate system. It adds that no tolerance on those axle figures shall be granted administratively or otherwise. So it attaches to the axle-group table and to nothing else.

There is also an agricultural exemption with a distance on it. A vehicle carrying agriculture, dairy or crop products from a farm or holding facility to a processing plant, feed mill or market is outside the weight limits within 150 miles of the point of origination.

N.C.G.S. § 20-118. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the statute was last read for this batch.

Beyond the weight table, the paperwork comes down to that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary, and neither stops a sale.

Two North Carolina rules are drafted differently enough from the rest to matter here. The state brands a vehicle salvage where the cost of repairs, parts and labour, exceeds seventy-five per cent of its fair retail market value — and it applies that test whether or not an insurer has declared a total loss. Several states make an insurer’s decision a route into the definition. North Carolina writes the insurer out of it.

The second is a six-year line, and it decides the process rather than the test. A vehicle up to and including six model years old goes through preliminary and final inspections by the Division’s Enforcement Section before it can be retitled. One more than six model years old may be retitled without inspection, and the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the seventy-five per cent sum. The same repair bill therefore counts against a five-year-old truck and not against a seven-year-old one.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

Those rules apply to every truck on the list, and the list runs a great deal wider than one port row that belongs 0.05 miles down the road. Day cabs and road tractors. Tankers and bulk trailers. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them, and every one of them loads under the same 80,000 lb ceiling.

• 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.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• 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’s a bonded route. Neither stops a sale.
• My truck works out of the port. Does it matter which town that counts as?Not to us. Our own data puts the Port of Morehead City under Beaufort by 260 feet, which tells you how much weight to put on a filing. Tell us where the truck actually is and we will work from that.
• Small town on the water. Do you actually come out here?Often nobody needs to. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting. Driving it to us is also fine.

That second question is the one a small place in Carteret County asks first, and behind it the reasons have nothing to do with a port row that missed its town by 0.05 miles.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one tractor too many in the yard. Sometimes the truck is simply sitting, and every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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.