Hiring & managing drivers

One vehicle earns; a fleet compounds. Drivers are how you get there — they run deliveries in parallel while your own vehicle works its jobs or you plan the next move. But drivers take a cut, and the size and shape of that cut is the difference between scaling and bleeding.

The hiring pool

The Drivers tab shows a pool of five candidates, refreshed daily. Hiring itself costs nothing — drivers are paid from the work they do. Each candidate shows a skill rating (0–100) and their terms. Skill is not cosmetic: skilled drivers finish routes faster and have fewer accidents, less cargo damage, and fewer failures. Most of the pool sits in the 20–40 range, solid professionals in the 50s and 60s appear regularly, and drivers above 80 are rare finds worth grabbing when you see them.

Contract drivers: fast, available, expensive

A contract driver takes one job and leaves. No commitment — and the worst economics in the game:

• 50% of the payout up front, non-refundable — cancel the mission or fire them mid-run and it is gone;
• a 25% completion fee when the job lands;
• a hidden personal cut of 6–12% — every contractor skims, and you only learn how much after their first completed job;
• fuel billed at double the actual cost.

After everything, you typically keep around 40% of the contract price. And there is one more line in the fine print: contract drivers occasionally steal the cargo — a small risk (a percent and a half or so) that doubles for special cargo and rises for payouts over $5,000. Never hand a contractor the event diamond.

So why use them at all? Because 40% of a contract you could not otherwise run is still profit, with zero commitment. Early on, before you can open a company, they are the only way to run two jobs at once — just feed them cheap, boring cargo.

Hourly drivers: the real business

Once you open your company, you can hire staff drivers by the hour — $3 to $7 per hour depending on the driver, and that is essentially all they cost: no upfront cut, no completion fee, no fuel markup, no theft. Roughly 95% of every payout stays with you.

The catch is that wages accrue whether the driver is earning or idle, and payroll scales: each additional active staff driver nudges everyone's effective rate up slightly (about 2.5% per driver). Five idle staffers is a slow leak; five busy ones is a money machine. The management skill of the mid game is simply keeping the staff working.

Opening your company

The gateway to hourly drivers is the Open Company milestone: available after 20 completed missions, for a one-time fee of $15,000. It looks expensive next to your first van, but the math is short: on a $2,000 contract, an hourly driver costs you perhaps $100 of the payout where a contractor would take $1,200. If your second vehicle runs even a few jobs a day, the fee pays itself back within days — and every job after that is the dividend.

Managing the operation

• Assign drivers from the Fleet panel — each vehicle card shows its driver, and the vehicle detail view lets you assign, replace, or unassign on the spot.
• One driver, one vehicle, one mission at a time. Parallelism comes from more pairs, not from overloading one.
• Match skill to stakes. Your highest-skill driver belongs in the biggest vehicle with the priciest cargo. Give rookies the compact and the parcel runs — their accidents are cheap there.
• Do not fire mid-mission. Firing a driver on the road fails their current job — the cargo, the payout, and any upfront fees all go with it.
• Watch the feed. Accidents, breakdowns, and completions stream into the notification center; a recap catches you up on anything that happened while you were away.