Though I’m sure there’s an exception to the rule or two out there, as Michigan-based small fleet owner Leander Richmond said in the last edition of Overdrive Radio, when it comes to occupied-vehicle booting, it by and large doesn’t happen to drivers of cars, it does not happen to campers – it does, often enough, happen to truckers.
He was talking about the phenomenon of private-lot or other booting of trucks in which drivers are sleeping, most often during federally mandated rest periods, of course. As so many of you likely saw last week with a report from a Dandridge, Tenn., Speedway fuel-stop location, that can include tow trucks hooked up to you while you rest, with a fee required to unhook.
Richmond, as he noted in the last podcast, believes there should be a prohibition on booting or hooking to an occupied vehicle in this manner, and it’s a subject we’ll be covering in more depth in a later issue of Overdrive. For now, in today’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast some sound piece of advice before parking in any spot where you have doubt about the possibility of a tow-hook or boot in your future. It seems obvious, but if you’re at an open location with any no-parking sign within eyesight –- do the reasonable thing and get out and ask a question in-store before you make a $300 or more costly mistake.
That only works to an extent, of course. … Some cases here from readers where it most definitely didn’t. Take a listen:
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Also in the podcast: Accounts from the one-truck businesses of Bryan Hutchens, Ruben Carrion, and Kit Spanfellner from That’s a Big 10-4 on D.C. last month. Catch video profiles of those last two via those links to their names. As for Hutchens, in the podcast part of what we talk about is his 1996 Peterbilt 379, pictured below:
Hutchens bought the 3406-powered Pete about three years ago, in-framing the engine very shortly thereafter, in addition to a myriad of other mechanical work he put into the unit, and which he describes in the podcast.
Hutchens represents the second generation of his Generations Express business, haulng with authority out of Ardmore, Okla. His family and himself in earlier years had hauled a lot of reefer freight out of California up through the time of CARB’s emissions regulations essentially outlawing a lot of their diesel equipment some years back. Today, the owner-operator pulls anything that will fit on a step deck, a lot of it oversize and going to drilling operations in the four-state area around Oklahoma. This Brunner headache rack he added to the truck certainly aids in ample securement-equipment storage space.
