Early this year, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Truck Leasing Task Force, principally examining lease-purchase programs administered by motor carriers, issued its final report, which recommended abolishing carrier-administered lease-purchases entirely. After polling the readership on lease-purchase outcomes, a two-part feature in Overdrive shared results, likewise lessons learned from a variety of lease-purchase experiences:
**Carriers' lease-purchase programs 'meaningful' for at least half of lessee operators
**Tale of two lease-purchases: A path to truck ownership, and a swift exit
Following, longtime Overdrive contributor Clifford Petersen narrated his own, often-difficult leasing experiences, and National Association of Small Trucking Companies President David Owen offered this opinion on the task force's recommendations, noting so-called "predatory" lessors among trucking companies have earned their reputations, yet abolishing such programs entirely seemed to Owen to ignore a chance at entrepreneurship good programs offer.
What do you think? If you missed the following poll question at the end of our two-part feature, you might spend some time with the variety of experience on offer in the four stories linked above, then come back to this page to weigh in on the fundamental question raised by the task force's central recommendation:
[Related: There's plenty to consider before entering a lease-purchase agreement with a motor carrier]
