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Does HERE support truck routing?

Short answer: Yes, and it’s the strongest reason to choose HERE. But transportMode=truck selects the routing engine. It does not tell HERE how tall your vehicle is.
Omit the dimensions and you get a route. It returns 200. It contains a polyline. It may route a 4.1-metre trailer under a 3.4-metre bridge.HERE will not warn you, because you did not tell it there was a trailer.

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What HERE expresses

Verified against the Matrix Routing v8 OpenAPI specification, v8.47.0:
  • Dimensions — height, width, length, trailerLength (centimetres)
  • Weight — grossWeight, currentWeight, emptyWeight, payloadCapacity (kilograms)
  • Axles — axleCount, weightPerAxle, and weightPerAxleGroup with single, tandem, triple, quad, quint
  • tunnelCategory — ADR restriction code B, C, D, E
  • shippedHazardousGoods — eleven cargo types
  • kpraLength — kingpin-to-rear-axle, for California and Idaho
  • category: lightTruck — a legal exemption that does not waive physical dimension limits
  • trailerCount, tiresCount, licensePlate for environmental-zone evaluation
Weight per axle group is the decisive parameter for US carriers.Federal bridge formula and state limits are frequently expressed per axle group, not per axle. A five-axle tractor-trailer with a steer axle, a tandem drive, and a tandem trailer group cannot be described by a single per-axle scalar.Competitors that expose only a scalar axleWeight cannot determine route legality in those jurisdictions.

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Units will catch you

ParameterUnitA common wrong value
vehicle[height]centimetres4.1 → a four-centimetre truck
vehicle[grossWeight]kilograms35 → a 35 kg truck
vehicle[axleCount]counttractor only, omitting trailers
Units are not validated for plausibility. Pass 4.1 and HERE routes a four-centimetre vehicle under every bridge in North America. 200.
vehicle supersedes truck. The truck object is deprecated in the current v8 spec. weightLimit is deprecated in favour of grossWeight.If you’re reading a 2021 tutorial, you’re reading deprecated parameters.

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Verify it actually applies

Route a 410 cm vehicle through the 11foot8 bridge (Durham NC), Storrow Drive (Boston), and the Southern State Parkway (Long Island). Any path returned is a failure. Run the same three in car mode as a control. Put this in CI. A refactor that drops vehicle[height] from a params dict is invisible in code review and obvious in a failing test.

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Common misconceptions

“transportMode=truck is truck routing.” It selects the engine. Both parts are required. “category=lightTruck waives dimension limits.” It waives certain legal restrictions written for normal trucks. Bridges do not care about your category. “axleCount is the tractor’s axles.” It’s the whole combination, including all trailers. Range 2–255. “200 means a valid route.” 200 with an empty routes array means no path exists. For truck routing, “no legal route” is a correct answer. A system that retries with relaxed constraints has just produced an illegal route. “Google can do this if I add logic.” It can’t. The underlying road attributes are not exposed to you.

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The dangerous pattern

Server-side truck routing with constraints, device-side recalculation without them.The driver deviates. The phone reroutes. The constraint set never left your backend.Push vehicle profiles to the device. Test the recalculation path.

Truck Routing

Constraints, units, and validating they apply.

Calculate a Truck Route

Working code, with CI assertions.

Fleet Routing

Where the profile lives, and how it reaches the device.

HERE vs TomTom

The axle-group difference, sourced.
HERE documentation: Routing API v8 reference
Need production HERE API keys or implementation support? Placematic is an official HERE Technologies reseller and implementation partner. We have deployed HERE truck routing into production ELD systems. Talk to us.