Independent owner-operator Jeremy Ward always liked the look of the 1995 Peterbilt 379 that his dad, Jerry, owned throughout the 2000s. He liked it so much that, a few years after his dad sold it in 2011, he went and bought it back for his own use, even entering into a lease-purchase program with the fleet that owned it to get his dad’s old rig back under family ownership.
The 36-year-old Jeremy, out of Clare, Mich., was actually the first person to put a bug in his dad’s ear about buying the truck around the year 2000, when Jeremy was just a teenager.
“I was in high school and saw the truck going down the freeway,” he says. “I called my dad and told him I saw the coolest-looking Peterbilt. It was Kawasaki green with a checkered flag going down the side. Back then, you didn’t see bright green trucks like you do now. He didn’t seem interested then, but he ended up buying it about a year later.”
In 2010, dad Jerry, who was an independent owner-operator himself, was ready to get out of the industry. He took the truck to a local trucking company, Hog Wild Transportation in Clare, Mich., and drove the truck for them for a year or so before they bought it from him.
“He always loved that truck,” Jeremy says. “My plan was to buy it back and fix it up, maybe give it back to him. Now I use it in my own business.”
Jeremy had been an independent owner-operator in the mid-2000s doing business as Wild Ride Express, but he sold all of his trucks in 2008, during the recession.
