Truck Parking Club, the paid-parking giant that courts owner-operators and property owners to its app, has a long, complicated history with a notorious “nightmare” customer, Super Ego.
In fact, Super Ego’s overstays at Truck Parking Club properties reached such legendary proportion, the company devised a penalty system to bill them as much as 5.5 times a night’s rate -- and many property owners likely had no clue what was going on.
That’s according to a half dozen former Truck Parking Club employees and largely corroborated by TPC CEO Evan Shelley himself.
- TPC insiders revealed the company's major problems with the notorious "chameleon carrier" dumping trailers.
- TPC, insiders said, had to devise a penalty system to charge Super Ego up to 5.5 times the nightly rate as the situation spiraled out of control.
- Multiple former employees noted TPC leadership hid the information from property owners, and TPC CEO Evan Shelley responded to the allegations.
- This is the first part of an Overdrive series revealing how TPC has managed marketing and customer/staff relations on its way to the top of the paid-parking heap, based on inside stories from current and former TPC employees, and CEO Shelley himself.
[Related: Truck Parking Club turns free spaces paid: Is this the future of parking?]
The problems with Super Ego shine a light on how TPC prioritizes member needs against rapid growth.
A big cause of frustration for staff and property members alike stems from the fact that the “Airbnb of truck parking” does not actually verify ownership of properties that sign onto the service, former employees noted.
TPC rather relies on an “attestation” on the part of the property owner applicant, wherein the applicant swears they have the legal right to offer truck parking, assuming all liability that could stem from the parking arrangement.
Technically, it’s industry standard. Airbnb does something similar.
But in practice, TPC staff reported constant headaches from property owners finding TPC signs on their land. Former TPC employees said CEO Shelley skipped verifying properties to prioritize growing the company.
TPC doesn't "require any kind of documentation whatsoever," an early employee of the company said. Despite repeated warnings from staff and complaints from drivers and property members since the early days, Shelley pressed on with attestations.
"Their main concern is fast growth" and “scaling, scaling, scaling,” the employee said. “We were always told that to do the verification would take time.”
Truck Parking Club and Super Ego
To be clear, no one accuses TPC of having any dealings with Super Ego outside its affiliated carriers parking trucks and trailers at TPC-managed lots.
Exposed by CBS's 60 Minutes and extensive Overdrive reporting as a network of some of the worst fleets in trucking, prone to high crash rates and terrible CSA scores, widespread electronic-logging-device fabrication, and misleading and underpaying drivers, Super Ego simply paid for parking at TPC locations. It often made a mess of things there, according to TPC insiders.
[Related: Super Ego's 'chameleon' network includes some of the most dangerous fleets in trucking]
“Oh dear God,” said Shawna Taylor, a TPC customer service employee and former company driver who said she was let go from TPC without much explanation after a year on the job. “Number one problem child,” she added of Super Ego.
Taylor said “the biggest thing I remember about them is they would pay to park for a night or two, and then on day three the property owner would be calling in saying these trailers are still there. On day five, still there, so of course it got to the point where we had to implement penalties.”
According to four former TPC employees, Super Ego’s wild overstay problem prompted an entire penalty system still in use today.
“They just would not pay," said Taylor. "They started taking up other spaces, dropping off trailers, picking up another, and leaving two trailers in one paid spot. Now property owners are calling us mad as hell that half their lot is filled with Super Ego trailers and there’s only one reservation for them.”
In response, TPC instituted a penalty system that put a financial squeeze on chronic overstayers.
It's spelled out on TPC's website:
"Any member who overstays is subject to an arrears penalty equal to 1.5× the original reservation (reservation cost plus 50% of the reservation)."
For every 10 additional overstays within a calendar year, the penalty goes up another 50% of the original reservation price, and “there’s no cap on that penalty,” said one former TPC employee who worked with the financial recovery team. “If the rate is $30 a night, which is already outrageous, it’s 1.5 times that charged, and you have no control of your account and we’re authorized to charge that to your card.”
The former financial recovery employee added that “we have people out there, companies and fleets, who have had a penalty of 5.5 times” the original reservation price.
On a $30 reservation, a 5.5x penalty would come out to $165 a night. After ten more overstays, it would go up to $180.
“If you’ve got a fleet with 500 trucks, it’s very easy to overstay that many times,” the former employee said. “The fleets get hammered.”
Financial recovery workers also make 1% on the penalty payments charged to fleets, something this employee called "trashy."
Super Ego was TPC’s “bread and butter,” the employee said, raking in thousands for the company but causing problems for property members.
Taylor, the former customer service employee, described what it was like trying to hunt down payment and answers from Super Ego. The leasing giant famously operated with a dizzying web of “chameleon” fleets, and is involved in a class action suit brought by drivers over pay skimming, with dozens describing the company’s structure as purposefully labyrinthian.
“You never talk to the same person [at Super Ego] twice, and they don’t communicate with each other,” said Taylor. Super Ego had plenty of money to pay for parking, though. “Most of the time they’d just say, ‘Oh sorry,’ and pay whatever the fee was, they didn’t care.”
In a lengthy interview, Evan Shelley, TPC’s founder and CEO responded to Overdrive’s questions, but wouldn’t address the specifics of its customer, Super Ego.
“I can't talk to how our customers are behaving on our platform,” said Shelley. But “in instances where trucker members overstay, it does create issues for our property members, and most importantly, other trucker members that are booking there. It's not a good situation for anyone. And in response to that, rather than going the route of predatory towing, predatory booting, massive fines, what we did is create a system where” if you’ve “overstayed on this booking, you get a penalty. And the penalty is used to A) handle the collections of doing it, and B) show them that this is not the right thing.”
Shelley compared the system to cars running over a meter and getting a ticket. “We adopted a similar pattern,” he said. “Our goal is to never have that happen in a perfect world because we’re not interested in penalizing anyone.”
The early TPC employee confirmed what Shelley would not, that the penalty system was “inspired by Super Ego,” but said the company did its best to investigate missing truck owners.
“They have a department who tries to investigate [overstays] especially when it’s just a driver,” the early employee said. “They make every effort to get ahold of the driver first and talk to him, and sometimes they can waive the penalties, but [Evan] is sick and tired of overstaying and causing capacity problems.”
TPC's former employees gave varying estimates of just how lucrative Super Ego's business was to the company, but Shelley said Super Ego doesn't even represent one percent of total revenues in 2026.
The employees said TPC likely took in more than half a million from Super Ego in the company's first year, but Shelley said they've "never been an extremely large customer."
Taylor, the former TPC customer service rep, once asked a Super Ego rep what they did for truck parking before TPC came around. Make the drivers "drive around for hours and hours," the Super Ego rep told Taylor.
[Related: Truckers still torn: Truck Parking Club's huge growth with pay-to-park]
Do TPC property members get the full story?
TPC employees described an energized, fun job in the company's early days, though it quickly devolved into putting out fires with angry property owners and spurned drivers.
“You know how many times I’d get a call from someone saying, ‘I own this property, why are your signs here?’” the former financial recovery employee said, adding that while TPC staff does call property members and ask detailed questions about the lots, there isn’t always a physical inspection.
The same former financial recovery employee said his supervisors forbid him from telling property owners about the penalty system.
“If the properties knew we were charging these guys $400 a night and only giving them $30,” they’d want a piece, the employee said. “I would get told legitimately I was not allowed to tell them. It was so shady.”
“They hide everything,” another former TPC employee said. “They want to be a tech company, they don’t want to be in customer care, they just want everything automated.”
“They really don’t want the property owners to know” about the penalties, a third employee said.
All three employees who said TPC doesn’t want property members knowing about the penalty fees situation were in contact with property members directly on the phone and via email. As noted, though, TPC does mention the penalty system on its website. On the carrier side, people parking trucks agree to the penalty terms before booking a site.
As far as instructing employees to omit penalty fee information from property members, Shelley was contrite and didn’t deny it.
“If that was said, that's wrong. Sorry,” he said. “If that was said by someone on our team to someone else, that is incorrect and should not have been said. There's no reason for us to hide it.”
Overall, while the TPC employees reported often feeling pressured to mislead property owners and carriers, most all said they liked the work helping drivers find parking.
One former TPC employee, John Luis Matheus, today works in industrial real estate and never drove a truck. He noted a purely positive experience “sourcing property owners, pitching them on the platform and getting their property listed,” he said. “It was really good, that’s kind of how I got into industrial real estate.”
Matheus said he still sees Shelley and the TPC crew, mainstays at trade shows, pretty regularly.
[Related: Survey says: Paid truck parking generally not utilized, resented by many truckers]
Offering some perspective on TPC detractors, often drivers who fault Shelley for cases where TPC takes over previously free truck stop parking, Matheus compared Shelley to big tech disruptors like Uber or Elon Musk.
TPC gets “a lot of attention good and bad, and some people are pissed as well about paid truck parking,” he said.
For perspective on the naysayers, Overdrive should “ask taxi drivers how they feel about Uber,” he said, referring to how the ride-hailing giant transformed the taxi industry, leaving formerly independent business owners often enough making less than minimum wage driving for the big tech firm, according to analysis from the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Find the other two parts of this series via the links below:
- Will Truck Parking Club ever start accepting fuel stop points?
- Truck Parking Club's social media influencer empire, policing of online reviews
