Travis County
The biggest assembly plant on the whole research set
Gigafactory Texas is the largest assembly plant in this research slice by floor area and by employment, and the record notes it is not a close contest. It sits in unincorporated Travis County rather than inside the city limits.
A four-star Army command is also carried here, recorded downtown at 2.19 miles from the centre. That is a headquarters rather than a depot, and the page says so rather than implying a freight operation that was never established.
One row resolves 9.77 miles out and still counts as within the place, which sounds wrong until you notice the city covers something over three hundred square miles. Big cities produce long within-city distances, and that is a fact about geography rather than a data error.
So the truck work here is inbound parts and outbound vehicles
A plant of that size does not run on one kind of truck, and neither of the two flows looks like general freight.
Parts arrive on a schedule tight enough that a late trailer stops a line. Finished vehicles leave on car haulers. Both are hard on equipment in undramatic ways: constant docking, low-speed manoeuvring, and trailers that spend their lives being coupled rather than running.
Around that sits the ordinary business of a large city — box trucks, service work and construction — spread across Travis County, which is big enough that 9.77 miles is still local.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
All of that runs under one statutory ceiling, and Texas raises the axle limits rather than the gross.
Texas sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb — the plain federal figures, with no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky grant.
What Texas grants instead is permits, and each one is written for a named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. There is no permit named for aggregate, stone, sand or quarry products. So a stone hauler here gets the general permit and nothing else, while a ready-mix truck sits on the list — two trades a reader might treat as one, on opposite sides of the line.
The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, and it comes with a bond and liability for actual damage to load-restricted roads. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight is ten per cent less than the maximum, so those two percentages run in opposite directions and must never be added together.
Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork comes down to one sentence.
Everything after that sentence 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.
One Texas rule is worth knowing because it runs further than any other state on file. Texas brands a truck salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds the actual cash value before the damage — effectively one hundred per cent, against eighty in Florida and sixty in Oklahoma. And it is a two-part test, not pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The statute lists thirteen major component parts, and the calculation leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. For a truck whose damage is mostly cosmetic that moves the answer a long way.
Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Car haulers off the outbound vehicle traffic. Day cabs and road tractors off the inbound parts runs. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, dump trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Travis County is large enough that a truck 9.77 miles from the middle of it is still working the same market, which is not true in most places we buy.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
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. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Austin
- 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 came out of a plant fleet.Plant trucks are usually well maintained and we are glad to see them. Tell us the service history if you have it.
- My car hauler decking is damaged.Decking is a repair, not a disqualifier, and it does not make a truck incomplete.
- What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
- How far out do you come?All of Travis County, which is bigger than it looks — 9.77 miles out is still in town here. Distance has never stopped a sale.
Why people call
Beyond a plant contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. An owner-operator who ran parts for years and has had enough of the schedule.
Yards across Travis County and out past the Army Futures Command offices usually have one waiting, and a plant that size turns over a great deal of equipment.
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.