it handles great on smooth roads but hit a shallow pothole and the handling goes to hell. then its fine. other than that it runs great. the milage on the neon is around 110K only had to replace the fuel rail and injectors and plugs.
The 2001 black Peterbilt 379 has around 765,570 miles, with 87,600 miles with a redone/upgraded motor had a more powerful turbo put on in place of the one it had when I bought it. The blower whine is alot more louder and clearer. Actually steering a truck like mines is no less harder than driving a full size caddillac from the 70s.
The only thing is how and when to make a turn when pulling trailers ranging from 28' puptrailers all the way to 53' dryvans. There are also trailers longer than 53',usually those are for hauing oversize/overweight loads they're called lowboy trailers, you can usually see thesekinds of trailers with as many as 9-12 axles hauling huge power generators, a/c units. These people almost always have some sort of police escort because they require alot of space for making a turn with that long of a trailer.
Thats how most accidents involving cars and 18 wheelers happen is because people driving cars dont know or care that a truck cant stop in such a short distance that a car can. A bobtail truck (no trailer) takes longer to stop than a truck pulling a trailer because there is no weight holding the truck back. Especially when a truck is making a right turn , the driver has to pull left a little bit into the lane to his left so his trailer axles would clear the turn without running over the curb where someone would probably be standing at. Then here comes some jackass in a car trying to cut the truck off while the driver is trying to pull hard right to make the turn. In some places its illegal to pass a truck on the right when its doing this. Of all accidents involving 18 wheelers and cars, 85% of the time it is the fault of the person driving the car.
So driving an 18 wheeer is real easy. You just gotta know how to shift gears in one because the gear shift pattern is alot different from a cars 5 spd transmission. The transmissions (18 wheeler and car) are exactly alike with one distinct difference. That being a trucks transmission 9 (in a 9spd its 4 over 5),10,13,15,& 18 spds all have a 5 over 5 pattern meaning a truck has a low 5 spd (switch down) and a high 5 (switch up) for the 13,15,& 18 its the same except that there is an extra switch for the 3,5, & 8 gears (these are called granny gears). Most drivers (new drivers entering trucking) would use the double clutch technique. They would use the clutch to get the tranmission out of gear and use the clutch again to shift to a higher gear. Downshifting is harder because when you clutch to take the transmission out of gear you have to rev the motor to around 1400rpm and clutch to get it back into a lower gear before the tach hits below 1100rpm. Many drivers like myself dont use the clutch when shifting. We shift gears using the motor (floating) meaning once the tach hits around 14-1550 rpm take the foot off the pedal and pull the gearshift out of gear and shift to a higher gear. Downshifting is the same way drop the tach to around 12-1250 pull it out of gear rev the motor to around 1400 and shift into the lower gear.
I can also shift gears in a normal car with a manual tranmission by floating them (using no clutch) :sarcastic:
I drove for these companies before Landstar (the company I drive for now)
KTL (sister company of TMC)
CRST Van Expedited
Covenant Transport
CFI (Contract Freighters Inc)
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