Update: the engines of October '02: "fear factor" concerning new technology diminishes with experience; doomsday hype recalls Y2K

Diesel Progress North American Edition, Oct, 2003 by Mike Brezonick

A year ago at about this time, kind of hush fell over the truck market in North America. After months of controversy, lawsuits and countersuits and finally frantic pre-buying, the new "pull ahead" engine emissions regulations took effect for heavy-duty truck engines on October 1.

Because of the range of technology solutions employed by the engine manufacturers to meet the new standards--solutions that included such things a cooled exhaust gas recirculation (EGR), variable geometry turbocharging, multiple turbocharger, variable valve actuation, etc.--and because the tight timetables prevented the usual amount of test time by the fleets, there was a lot of uncertainty.

Some observers predicted scary scenarios of thousands of broken-down trucks on the side of the road, fuel economy hits that would put fleets and owner-operators out of business in short order, dramatically reduced maintenance intervals and pretty much the end of the truck business as we knew it. And mostly as a result of those fears, the market for new trucks in North America essentially dried up for the better part of three months.

Finally, near the turn of the year, some trucks were ordered and delivered and the first of the new emissions certified engines hit the road for real. And as they did, in greater numbers as time went on, a funny thing happened: the engines worked, pretty much the way the engine builders said they would. And all of the hype appeared to be much ado about nothing.

"The fear factor is diminished," said Jim Fancher, marketing product manager at Volvo Trucks Inc. "Everybody said, I'm not going to touch those things, because I'm going to have high maintenance, it's going to cost me a ton in fuel and I've got to have special oils and I just don't know how it's going to perform." But a lot of that has been abated with the actual operation of the engines on the highway.

"It's almost like going to your doctor. Because they have to pay such healthy malpractice insurance, they always tell you the absolute worst case scenario because anything that then falls short of that is good news. I think to a certain extent, a lot of people in the industry were following that principle. Let's figure out what the absolute worst thing that could happen would be and let's plan on that. Consequently, that drove the fear factor right out of sight."

"I've heard people describe it as like Y2K," said Tom Kieffer, executive director of marketing at Cummins Inc. "Y2K was going to be the end of the world, but it came and it went and most people lived through it."

And in discussions with engine manufacturers and their fleet customers, most have managed to live through it quite easily. Here is a brief overview of what they've shared with Diesel Progress.

Detroit Diesel has shipped approximately 17,000 Series 60 engines with EGR, along with more than 3000 Series 50 engines, according to Tom Freiwald, senior vice president of marketing at DDC. "We have over 12,000 orders in the backlog and expect to ship a total of about 30,000 (Series 60s) this year. Our current build rate is 140 a day."

According to Freiwald, many of the problems that some had anticipated with the engines have not been evident. "Performance, reliability, and driveability are excellent," he said. "Soot in the oil never materialized as an issue.

"It seems that the variable geometry turbo makes the engine pull exceptionally well at lower rpm--hence the favorable reports from drivers--and they are leaving the transmission in a higher gear and letting the engine pull down closer to the torque peak, whirch is the point of maximum efficiency.

"We had some initial programming tweaking, there were some cracked pipes here and there and we dropped two bolts down two gear trains which resulted in gear train failure, but that's been the extent of the issues with EGR."

As far as one of the biggest concerns going in, fuel economy, Freiwald said that "originally, fuel economy was estimated to be 3 to 5 percent worse than non-EGR engines and some of the very early results were worse than that. However, most of the difference was due to winter fuel and engines that were not broken in.

"We are now getting actual in-use data from big fleets which are running identically spec'd tractors, with and without EGR, and the difference in fuel economy has dropped below 3 percent."

Freiwald added that Schneider National, the largest privately held carrier in the U.S. and DDC's biggest customer, has accumulated over 2.2 million miles with the new engines. "We just disassembled an EGR Series 60 with 252,000 miles and it looks perfect," he said.

Those strong reports were echoed by Dave Walters, director of maintenance at JDC Leasing, a regional hauler based in Franklin, Wis. JDC operates a 500-truck fleet and hauls automotive parts for GM and DaimlerChrysler, with the average haul approximately 400 miles. About half of JDC's fleet consists of Freightliner Columbia trucks with EGR-equipped Series 60 engines and Walters said his experience with the DDC engines has been "very positive so far."