Fuel, wear & repairs
Contracts are your revenue; this page is your cost sheet. Fuel, wear, and repairs are the quiet drains that decide whether a busy fleet is actually a profitable one — and all three reward a little planning with a lot of margin.
Fuel
Fuel costs the same at every gas station on the map, and vehicles burn it according to their class — a sedan sips, a heavy tractor drinks. Over a long haul in a big rig that difference stops being trivia and starts being the reason a contract was or was not worth taking. Filling is quick, and stations activate when you pull up close.
Two habits keep fuel a rounding error instead of a problem:
- Refuel on route, not on empty. Gas stations are real places on the map; passing one at half-tank costs seconds. Running dry costs a rescue.
- Know your vehicle's leash. Every vehicle has a range, and it is shorter than new players expect. Check the mission's distance against what is actually in the tank before you accept — including the drive out to the pickup, which is on your fuel too.
Emergency assistance
When something goes wrong on the road, the Emergency Assistance menu has two buttons, both priced to make you wish you had planned:
- Mobile refuel — a truck comes to you, but the fuel is priced well above the pump and a dispatch fee rides on top;
- Tow — a flat fee, and your vehicle is delivered to the nearest gas station.
A tow is mandatory, not optional, when a vehicle breaks down completely — a machine at zero condition will not drive another metre.
Wear: the slow tax
Every kilometre wears your vehicle across six components — engine, transmission, suspension, brakes, tires, and body. Accidents damage them far faster than distance alone. Condition is not cosmetic: a worn vehicle has more accidents, which cause more wear, which causes more accidents — a spiral that ends in a breakdown and a tow bill. The Fleet panel flags vehicles as "Worn" or "Need attention" before it gets that far; believe it.
Repairs
Repairs happen at auto-repair garages — real places on the map, like the gas stations. Send the vehicle in (or drive it there), pick what to fix, and wait: repairs take real time, up to about half an hour for major work. You have three ways through the wait:
- Wait it out — free, and fine if the fleet has other vehicles earning;
- Watch a short rewarded ad — free skip, always optional;
- Spend a few gems — the premium-currency convenience path.
The bill itself scales hard with vehicle class: repair pricing runs from the compact car's baseline up to a different order of magnitude entirely for the heavy truck. This is the hidden cost of the big rigs — the purchase price is only the entry fee.
Budgeting: the pre-acceptance check
Before accepting any contract, the mission panel shows estimated fuel and wear for each route option, alongside the risk numbers. A quick mental checklist:
- Fuel: long distance in a thirsty vehicle — does the payout still look good once the tank is paid for?
- Wear: long routes in big vehicles quietly accrue real repair costs; premium contracts should be paying for that.
- Risk: a fast route doubles the chance you pay for an accident on top of everything else — see the route planning guide.
The habit takes five seconds per contract, and it is the difference between a fleet that looks busy and one that banks money. For how the revenue side is calculated, see contracts & payouts.
Why running costs stay invisible until they hurt
Contracts announce themselves. Running costs do not — and that asymmetry is what catches new operators out.
A delivery arrives with a number attached, and it feels like the transaction is complete. It is not. Fuel left the tank while you were watching the map, components moved fractionally closer to needing attention, and the vehicle finished somewhere convenient for the job that just ended rather than the one that starts next.
None of that appears as a line item at the moment it happens. It surfaces later, as a tank that needs filling, a warning that needs acting on, or a drive across town that earns nothing. By then it is hard to connect the expense to the decisions that caused it — which is exactly why a fleet can look profitable per job and still be going backwards.
The habits that keep a fleet cheap
Treat fuel as a route constraint, not an errand. A stop that costs you seconds because you passed a station anyway is free. A stop that costs you a detour because you ignored three of them is not, and running dry costs considerably more than either.
Repair before you are forced to. Wear is gradual and cheap to address; the failure at the end of it is neither. A vehicle that breaks down does not simply stop earning — it needs recovering, and recovery is priced to discourage exactly this.
Watch where vehicles end their day. Two contracts with identical pay are not identical if one leaves the vehicle near tomorrow's work and the other strands it on the far side of the river. Nobody reimburses the drive back.
Match the vehicle to the job, not to your ambitions. A large vehicle running small loads burns large-vehicle fuel for small-load money. The bigger truck earns its keep only when the contracts justify it.
What the fleet does on its own
Company vehicles look after themselves up to a point. A vehicle that finishes a job low on fuel or badly worn will take itself to a station or a workshop without being told, spend the time it needs, and come back ready — and you will be billed for it, whether or not you were watching.
This is a convenience, not a strategy. Self-service happens at the worst possible moment: after the job, when the vehicle is already wherever the job left it, and at whatever the nearest option charges. An operator who plans maintenance chooses the timing and the place; one who does not gets both chosen for them.