Scrap trucks, vans and SUVs

A pickup or van at the end of its life is a good scrap sale for one plain reason: there’s more of it. A full-size pickup or a cargo van carries more steel than a compact sedan, and scrap is bought by weight.

The weight number people get wrong

Open the driver’s door and you’ll find a label on the door edge or pillar. On trucks it usually shows the GVWR, the gross vehicle weight rating. Federal rules set that number at no less than the vehicle’s unloaded weight plus its rated cargo load plus 150 pounds for every seat. It’s a safety ceiling, not a scale reading, so it overstates what the truck weighs empty. For scrap, the number that matters is closer to curb weight. Our guide on how to find your car’s weight shows where to look.

And weight is only one input. A truck’s price on a scrap board is quoted per ton, and the per-ton figure itself moves with the metal market. Scrap prices per ton explains how to read those numbers without being misled by them.

Vehicles in this group

• Pickups, half-ton to heavy-duty, two-wheel or four-wheel drive.
• Cargo and work vans, including ones with racks or shelving.
• Minivans and passenger vans.
• SUVs of any size, including the ones with a third row nobody has used in years.

Bigger than a heavy-duty pickup? Box trucks, step vans, dump trucks, semi tractors and trailers are on the page for box trucks and semis, and motorhomes and campers on RVs and campers. Running or not, with a title or working out the paperwork, see the other pages under what we buy.

Parking rules that catch big vehicles

Some towns near us are stricter about trucks parked on residential streets than about cars. Tinley Park’s code lets only passenger cars, station wagons and privately owned pickups or panel trucks of 3/4 ton or less park on the street unless signs say otherwise. Hickory Hills bars trucks over 8,000 pounds empty and commercial vehicles from its residential zones at any time. Midlothian limits commercial vehicles in residential districts to an hour. A dead work truck at the curb can become a ticket fast, and our removal page explains how a street pickup goes.

Loading a heavy vehicle

Tell us the make, model and roughly how it sits: on good tires, on flats, or nose-down on a sloped driveway. Long-bed trucks and high-roof vans need a little more planning, and a vehicle that’s missing wheels or its engine is covered on the page for stripped and incomplete cars.