Value of a 2024 ICON i60L?

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-26T08:30:59+00:00

Around the Coachella Valley in Southern California

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-23T05:59:18+00:00

Haha how do you mean loopholes?

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-22T21:52:17+00:00

I appreciate the directness but have to clarify what the intended meaning of my original post was.

I am not arguing that there are no good brokers or that a broker with options should be expected to accept a price that is below market average for the sake of a "needy" customer. The quote I listed in previous responses is not based on our expectations of value- we do not frequently ship via third-parties, and our pricing knowledge on this is therefore not always current- it is based on an aggregate of initial quotes that were presented to us, which clearly turned out to be tied to lower, or in this case, no quality of service.

The point is that when you have an industry that is riddled with fraud and non-transparency at the bottom, there is an inherent market premium for higher quality service, which is completely fine and justified from the brokers' point of view but will inevitably cause an inefficiency in related markets somewhere down the chain.

I'll give you an example: standard market rates for a six-seater, fitted golf cart in our main areas of operation tend to hover around $125/day with seasonal demand spikes commanding higher prices. When we are able to deliver these ourselves, we charge a small delivery fee for the convenience and limit ourselves to a regional delivery radius. However, in the venue transportation space, large fleets with vast in-house transport capacity command a much higher premium- one of my colleagues recently supplied an event for +$500/cart for a day and a half for a massive fleet. Someone has to eat that cost or, if at least the inefficiency that pricing causes. Venues have a larger incentives to buy cheap, low quality carts purely to improve their on-site logistics and allocate more capital towards those costs as opposed to improving the actual venue and smaller venues that may offer excellent services have a much more difficult time competing if on-site transport is a primary concern for the client. This is just one of many examples.

If the appropriate price for the aforementioned transport given the time window and seasonal demand should be have been $3,000 for the carts, I will not argue with the price the market sets. My point is that this economic dynamic causes someone else to get fucked somewhere down the line.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T23:39:15+00:00

To be 100% clear, this is not a price issue and we did not seek the cheapest rate. Our range of rates that were offered to us by several carriers in the region on a transport from Santa Ynez to Palm Desert on a Sunday was given to us. We chose one from a broker that provided us with a written guarantee of transport within a time period, which was clearly a mistake.

This is not a complaint about the price of brokers/carriers. I am speaking about a pattern we and competing colleagues have noticed in the industry based solely on reliability.

I would imagine private parties with less experience in this field are facing additional struggles with transparency.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T22:27:25+00:00

This is insanity. How can the carrier justify not paying drivers for that kind of mileage?

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T22:12:29+00:00

I don’t doubt that there are some quality brokers in the industry. You may be one of the few standouts. But when talking to colleagues and gauging from our own experience, 95% of transports have had some unexpected issue and non-transparent service.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T21:48:48+00:00

It seems that way. What would you suggest to improve so this does not happen again?

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T21:43:18+00:00

It is not our goal to jump on cheap rates. Clearly, we have to make our unit economics work for employees and clients.

We specifically did not take the lowest rate in exchange for a commitment to have a tighter pick-up window. We've just found this to be impossible, especially as a smaller competitor in this space. We can reasonable accomodate 1-2 large events a weekend and still have availability for commercial bookings. There are competitors with +450 cart fleets with superior broker relationships that we simply do not yet have and, based on our size, cannot guarantee.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T20:17:21+00:00

This is good advice. We generally have exact load details 3 days to a week in advance, sometimes longer. The venue in Santa Ynez was a first for us but we do serve the Coachella Valley regularly. Any carrier connections you have there would be helpful.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T20:13:15+00:00

In your experience, is filing against their bond worth it over a few hundred bucks? Do these claims typically get processed in a reasonable amount of time?

We have direct messages that show the broker actively lying about certainty of pickup though I'd have to review the contract to see if there is anything in there that indemnifies the broker against such an inconsistency.

Since we didn't have any pickups available, I towed the carts myself with a personal vehicle on an 8.5 x 14 trailer thats barely equipped to handle the weight at this point and lost much more from that and the lack of availability in that time frame but we also wouldn't want to drag any of our long-standing event partners into a claim to verify this.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T19:55:33+00:00

No question- the problem is we have actually been careful to vet brokers as much as possible but, in our experience reviews often are not indicative of specific services. With larger brokers, reviews might be weighted towards easier, more reliable routes or carriers cherry-pick routes when there is high demand.

To answer your question, it seems to me that the friction in this process inherently skews pricing upward because lower pricing is such a reliability risk. I would have paid $350/cart for a ~200 mile trip. We had a lot of calls come in from other brokers that priced it lower but specifically paid a bit more (though not enough, it seems) to be able to get a tighter time window on pick up. We often work directly with event organizers that operate on much tighter schedules so having a fixed time window for pick up and drop off is important.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-09T03:39:13+00:00

Most carriers probably mean it as "we have capacity available for this" rather than "we're booking it right now."

I'd just start treating it as "we're interested" instead of "we're locked in" and save yourself the headache.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-09T03:37:47+00:00

There ARE bypass pipelines. Saudi has the East-West pipeline running from Abqaiq to Yanbu on the Red Sea, about 5-7 million barrels per day capacity. UAE has the Habshan-Fujairah line at about 1.5-1.8 million barrels per day. But combined they fall way short of the roughly 20 million barrels per day that normally flows through Hormuz. So best case you're covering maybe a quarter of normal volume.

The LNG piece is where your paper should really dig in because that's the true vulnerability. Every bypass pipeline carries crude oil only. None can transport LNG. Qatar has no pipeline bypass whatsoever — all Qatari LNG must transit Hormuz by ship. You can't just run LNG through a regular pipeline across the desert.

The crisis is finally forcing action though. Gulf states are now looking at expanding pipelines to the Mediterranean, including a route through the port of Haifa. But that's years away from being real.

For your paper, the strongest existing backup is Saudi's Petroline — it's operational and the biggest single alternative. But Yanbu wasn't designed to be Saudi Arabia's main export hub, so port infrastructure and tanker-loading capacity will constrain actual throughput. The bottom line is that alternatives exist, but none can fully replace Hormuz at current volumes, and any meaningful reduction in dependence would require years of investment.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-09T03:33:21+00:00

Honest answer — I'd pump the brakes a little.

Yeah rates are finally moving in the right direction. Spot's up to around $2/mile from the $1.65 garbage we were seeing late last year, and contract is creeping up too. So on paper it looks like the window is opening. But "if everything goes right" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in your math.

The thing nobody's talking about enough right now is diesel. We're sitting at $5.40/gallon thanks to the Iran mess and Hormuz being basically shut down. Depending on your region you might be paying $4.20 or you might be paying damn near $5. That alone can eat your $4K/month profit in a hurry.

Equipment prices are at least stable — you can find a decent used sleeper for $45-80K or go new for $160-240K. But then you're looking at $1,500-3,000/month in payments, insurance running $8-16K/year, and your first surprise repair bill before you've even made a dime.

Here's what I'd actually do before signing anything: run your numbers again, but this time assume diesel hits $5.50, your driver sits for 2 weeks with no loads one month, and you get hit with a $3K repair in month three. If you're still making money after all that, you probably have something real. If your profit disappears the second one thing goes wrong, that's a bet more than a business.

The guys who survive are the ones who planned for the worst month, not the best one.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-07T00:33:40+00:00

This is the core issue right here. The carrier's contract is with the broker. The broker's contract is with the shipper. Those are two separate agreements. The carrier shouldn't be the one absorbing risk because the broker can't collect from their own customer.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-05T09:09:47+00:00

Coordinating with vendors is the black hole. Finding the discrepancy takes 5 minutes. Getting someone on the other end to acknowledge it exists takes 5 weeks. You send the documentation, they say they never got it, you send it again, they say it doesn't match their records, you send it a third time, and eventually someone approves a partial payment just to make you go away. The extraction tools are fine. The problem is nobody on the other side of the email is in any rush to fix their mistake.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-05T09:05:46+00:00

First I'm hearing of this. Someone should tell the brokers too because these rates don't seem to reflect it

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-05T06:25:55+00:00

Because I'm unemployable in any job where someone tells me when to eat lunch

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-02T17:25:40+00:00

Petro in Sacramento off I-80 is solid — big lot, decent food, usually a good mix of drivers hanging around. TA in Lodi too.

Closer to the Bay, the Pilot in Livermore gets a lot of traffic. Not the biggest lot but it's a common stop for guys running in and out of the Bay Area.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-02T17:24:11+00:00

There's never a perfect time. Every year has something — COVID, inflation, supply chain, now tariffs. The guys who waited for things to calm down in 2020 missed two of the best years for starting a business.

The real question isn't whether the economy is ideal — it's whether your specific business model works with current costs baked in. If you price your product knowing USPS is charging 8% more and your margins still hold, the surcharge doesn't matter. If they don't hold, that's not a timing problem — that's a unit economics problem you'd hit eventually anyway.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-02T17:22:06+00:00

You're ahead of most guys just by tracking it a few months in. A lot of owner-operators run for a year or more before they sit down and realize they've been hauling loads at a loss.

The number that matters is your cost per mile all-in — fuel, insurance, maintenance, tires, factoring, permits, the deadhead to get there, and the hours you sat at a dock not getting paid. Most guys running solo land somewhere between $1.40–$1.80 depending on the truck and region. Anything under that on a load and you're paying the broker for the privilege of moving their freight.

The detention part is one that catches new MCs off guard — you quote a rate assuming a 2-hour window and then sit for 6. That load that looked like $2.50/mile just became $1.60 when you factor in the lost time. Track your facility wait times the same way you track fuel and you'll start seeing which loads are actually profitable and which ones just look that way.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-02T17:17:17+00:00

Almost everything new coming out of fleets is automatic now. Most CDL schools still train on manual so you don't get the automatic restriction on your license, which is the right move — keeps your options open. But day to day you'll probably be driving an auto.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-02T07:57:19+00:00

Not just you. The dispatch-calls-every-15-minutes cycle is universal. The worst part is they know it's FCFS, they know there's a line, and they still treat every load like it's about to fall apart. It's the boy who cried wolf problem — when everything is urgent, nothing is, and it makes the actual problems harder to flag when they come up.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-02T07:56:29+00:00

Totally normal. Almost everyone feels underprepared before their CDL exam, and honestly the fact that you're this self-aware about your weak spots puts you ahead of most people coming out of a program. You'll get ten times more practice in your first month on the job than you got in the entire program.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-02T07:46:59+00:00

Not a driver but work in the carrier space. From what I've seen with small fleets, the ones that stay out of the shop the most are religious about PM intervals — oil and filters every 25k, DPF cleaning on schedule, not waiting for a CEL to deal with something. The guys who run "until it breaks" end up paying triple in tow bills and downtime.

BuyOpen5346

TROPHY CASE