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August 29, 2026

Planning a delivery in Drive Your Way: every decision before the vehicle moves

Accepting a contract looks like one click. It is really four decisions stacked on top of each other, and all four are made before anything leaves the kerb. Get them right and the job pays what the board said. Get them wrong and you still pay for the fuel, the wear and the time — the board just quietly keeps a share of the payout. This is what each of those decisions actually is.

The four decisions made before a delivery starts First, which contract — the board shows the payout but not the distance to the pickup. Second, which vehicle — cargo category decides what can take the job at all. Third, who runs it — driver skill shows up on the clock and on the cargo. Fourth, which route — the fast line saves time and costs risk. Each decision has a cost that only arrives later. FOUR DECISIONS, ALL MADE BEFORE ANYTHING MOVES 1 · WHICH CONTRACT The board advertises the payout. It says nothing about the empty run to reach the pickup. PAID IN FUEL AND TIME 2 · WHICH VEHICLE Cargo category decides what can take the job at all, before capacity even comes up. PAID IN JOBS YOU CANNOT SEE 3 · WHO RUNS IT Skill shows on the clock and on the cargo. A hired driver also takes their share. PAID IN MARGIN AND DELAY 4 · WHICH ROUTE Hurrying roughly doubles the odds of something going wrong, and it lands on the cargo. PAID AT HANDOVER
None of these bills arrive at the moment you decide. That delay is what makes them easy to get wrong.

One: which contract — and from where

The contracts board is an advertisement, and like every advertisement it quotes the revenue and not the cost. The number on a card is what the job pays on handover. It says nothing at all about the distance between that pickup point and where your vehicle happens to be standing right now.

That leg has a name in freight — deadhead — and it is on your bill. You burn fuel getting there, you put wear into the vehicle getting there, and the clock runs the whole time. It is entirely possible for the best-paying contract on the board to be the worst contract on the board, purely because it starts on the far side of town.

This is not an oversight we intend to fix. Repositioning being expensive is what makes the question where is my fleet standing worth asking at all, and it is the question real logistics companies think about all day. The practical habit is small: stop reading the board as "what does this pay" and start reading it as "what does this pay from here".

Two: which vehicle can even take it

Before capacity comes up, category does. Every load belongs to one of six cargo categories, and the category decides which vehicle classes are allowed to carry it. The starting compact car and the sedan handle solid freight and nothing else. Vans and trucks unlock perishable, fragile and special cargo. Refrigerated loads exist only for the refrigerated van, and liquids only for the tanker — buy neither and those contracts scroll past you forever.

The consequence is worth stating plainly, because new operators usually discover it backwards: a purchase is not really an upgrade in capacity, it is an upgrade in which contracts exist for you. A bigger vehicle that opens no new category has bought you volume you may not need. A modest specialised one can make a whole class of work visible for the first time. The cargo types guide has the full matrix.

Three: who runs it

You can take the job yourself — you are on the roster as your company's first driver — or hand it to someone you have hired. That is not only a question of your own time.

A driver's skill rating shows up in two places at once. It affects how quickly they cover ground, and it affects how steady they are, which lands directly on the cargo. A rookie on a winding line bleeds integrity in a way a veteran on the same line does not. And a hired driver takes their share of the payout, so the margin you were computing on the board was never the margin you would actually bank.

Since we added delivery deadlines, that choice has a second edge to it. Skill now shows up on the clock too — a slower driver on a route with more corners can miss a deadline that a better one would have made comfortably. The game warns you at hire time when the forecast does not fit, which is the moment the decision is still free to change.

Four: which route

Every leg can be run three ways — Fast, Normal or Economic — and the trade is honest and unglamorous. Hurrying roughly doubles the chance of something going wrong on the road; going gently roughly halves it. Whatever goes wrong lands on the cargo, and whatever is left of the cargo at handover sets which payout tier you collect.

Which means route choice is really risk pricing. A fragile load on a fast line in a worn vehicle is how the best-paying contract on the board turns into a failed delivery. The route planning guide covers when each strategy is actually worth it, and the integrity guide covers what the meter is telling you.

What the planner shows you, and what it does not

Until recently all of this had to be decided from the board and then corrected on the move: you accepted, the vehicle set off, and you adjusted the line while it was already running. The order was backwards, and we changed it.

The planner now opens before departure. The route is drawn on the map, you can reshape it by clicking, and the distance and arrival estimate recompute as you do. Nothing leaves until you press start. The point is not convenience — it is that the four decisions above finally happen in the same place, at the same time, while all of them are still reversible.

What the planner deliberately does not do is hand you a spreadsheet. You will not find a pre-computed profit figure for each option, and that is on purpose: we would rather you learn what a route costs by running it than by reading a number off a panel before you have ever driven the corridor. The information you get is the information a dispatcher would actually have — the shape of the route, how long it should take, and what the job pays.

The habit that separates a busy fleet from a profitable one

Every one of these four decisions has the same awkward property: the bill arrives later than the choice. Fuel drains while you are watching the map. Wear accumulates invisibly. The vehicle finishes somewhere convenient for the job that just ended rather than the one that starts next. None of it appears as a line item at the moment you caused it, which is exactly why a fleet can look profitable per job and still be going backwards.

The correction is not complicated, and it takes about five seconds per contract: before accepting, ask where the vehicle is, what the cargo needs, who is free, and how hard you intend to push. That is the whole game, repeated. Everything else is scale.

If you want to try the sequence rather than read about it, start as a guest — no download, no signup, and your first contract costs you nothing but the fuel to reach it.