What is FTL (full truckload) shipping?

FTL is one of the two poles of truck freight — the whole vehicle, or a share of one — and knowing where the line sits saves real money on both sides of it.

How FTL works

In a full truckload arrangement, one shipper books the entire vehicle. The truck arrives at your dock empty (for your purposes), loads your freight, and drives to the destination — no other shippers, no stops to serve someone else’s delivery, no cross-docking between legs. The route and schedule are shaped around your shipment because the whole truck is yours for the move.

Three practical consequences follow. Transit is essentially driving time, because nothing else is on the itinerary. Handling is minimal — freight is loaded once and unloaded once, which matters for anything fragile or awkward. And capacity is fixed: you pay for the vehicle whether you fill it or not, which is exactly the arithmetic that decides when FTL makes sense.

FTL vs. LTL: the same trade in opposite directions

LTL — less-than-truckload — is the opposite arrangement: your skid shares a truck with other shippers’ freight and pays only for the space and weight it uses, in exchange for delivery windows and shared handling. The full picture is in what LTL freight is, but the comparison compresses well:

	FTL	LTL
Vehicle	Exclusively yours	Shared with other shippers
Routing	Direct, origin to destination	Built from every delivery on the route
Handling	Loaded once, unloaded once	Handled alongside other freight
Timing	Set by your shipment	Delivery window (e.g. next business day)
You pay for	The whole vehicle	The space and weight you use

Neither is the upgrade; they price different situations. A single skid on FTL wastes capacity you paid for. Twelve skids forced through LTL pay shared-truck economics on freight that has nothing left to share — the truck is effectively full anyway. The crossover point, and the cost logic on either side of it, is covered in whether LTL is cheaper than a direct courier from the small end of the scale.

When FTL is the right call

Book the whole truck when one of these is true:

• The load fills, or mostly fills, the vehicle. Once your freight occupies most of a truck, exclusive use stops costing extra in any meaningful sense — there’s little space left to share.
• The freight needs a single-touch ride. Machinery, fragile goods, high-value shipments: loaded once, driven direct, unloaded once, with no neighbouring freight and no intermediate handling.
• The schedule is yours, not a window. FTL moves when you need it to, because no other shipper’s deliveries shape the route. When a delivery has to land on a specific day and time, exclusivity is what makes that possible.
• The whole order must travel together. Some loads shouldn’t be split across vehicles or days — staging for an installation, matched sets, sequenced materials.

FTL at regional scale: the dedicated truck

Here’s the part the textbook definition misses: FTL is an arrangement, not a trailer size. In regional freight, the same model — one shipper, exclusive vehicle, direct run — is delivered as a dedicated truck, sized to the load rather than defaulting to a 53-foot trailer. A dedicated Sprinter, or a 26-foot box truck carrying up to 10,000 lbs, is full-truckload thinking applied at the scale most Southern Ontario shipments actually need; matching the vehicle to the freight is its own decision, covered in choosing the right vehicle size for a shipment.

That’s what Sonic Transport’s dedicated service is: the whole vehicle, your freight only, direct across the GTA, Golden Horseshoe and Southern Ontario, with tailgate available on every box truck. Beyond 10,000 lbs, or when a load genuinely needs a semi and trailer, we arrange the move through transportation partners — same coordination, one point of contact, so the freight scales without your process changing.

What an FTL move costs depends on

There’s no rate card for FTL any more than for LTL, but the price of a dedicated move is built from consistent ingredients: the distance of the run, the size of vehicle the load requires, the driver’s time including loading and unloading, and any equipment the ends of the shipment need — a tailgate where there’s no dock, for instance. Because you’re buying the whole vehicle, the freight’s weight matters mainly for choosing the truck rather than for pricing space, which is one reason FTL quotes are simpler than LTL quotes for the same lane.

The practical consequence: an FTL quote is mostly a function of the lane and the vehicle, so the way to lower it isn’t to shave the declared details — it’s to right-size the truck to the load and to keep both ends of the move ready to load and unload without delay.

How to decide, quickly

Add up what’s shipping. A skid or a few, no hard deadline — that’s LTL. A load that fills most of a truck, a shipment that can’t share, or a delivery that must happen on your schedule — that’s FTL, at whatever vehicle size the freight dictates. In between, get both quotes and let the numbers on your actual lane decide.

If you’re weighing a full load, a dedicated run, or something too big for a straight truck, tell us what’s moving — a real person will size the vehicle, price the run, and arrange the semi through partners if the load calls for one.