What Fleets Are Saying
Curt Helzer, state equipment engineer, Wyoming Department of Transportation, Cheyenne
What does Helzer think of the upcoming diesels? "Not much. I'd like to buy as many [non-EGR diesels] as I could before they come out," he says. "We're a state agency and I'm not sure I can do that, but that's what I would do."
Wyoming's DOT runs about 400 Class 7 and 8 dump trucks outfitted with plows, scrapers and sanders for snow removal much of the year; in the summer, they haul paving materials in their dump bodies. They are a mixture of makes with engines from all domestic builders. Annual mileage is typically 30,000, so the Class 8s are kept for an average of 18 years and the Class 7s for 14 years.
"We'll have to buy something after October," he says warily. "We replace some [trucks] every year. "There'll be 10 this year, maybe more if I can do it, and they would take from what we have to buy next year."
He fears the EGR systems will cost more to maintain, and knows he'll have the expense of training technicians. This gets complicated because trucks are necessarily scattered throughout the state. Each district engineer wants his share of any new trucks because they invariably come with more capable plows and other equipment.
"I am obligated to take low bid," Helzer says, so he cannot write bid requests to avoid certain equipment because he'd hear from dealers who'd be excluded from bidding. Avoiding certain engines because they'll have EGR would not be a good enough excuse to try to specify an engine that won't. "It's politics," he laments.
~ ~ ~ ~
Howard Stirk, vice president, Puget Sound Truck Lines, Seattle
"They probably couldn't have picked a worse time to bring this to market," says Stirk. The sagging economy has weakened the industry and made fleets vulnerable if the "unproven technology" doesn't work out.
Weight, cost and reliability are Stirk's concerns. If he could, he'd buy trucks before the October deadline, then wait about a year to see what other fleets who do buy the new engines find out.
"In an ordinary year, that's what we'd have wanted to do," he says. As it is, the Pacific Northwest fleet's budgets will not support any power unit purchases this year.
Puget Sound Truck Lines hauls bulk commodities like wood chips, so runs lightweight tractors. Its principle engine now is the Cummins ISM, and any added weight it might get with EGR would cut payloads.
Because he's not been shopping for new tractors, he hasn't gotten any figures on price increases. Cummins' new marketing strategy has it dealing strictly with truck builders, and people from the local Cummins distributor no longer call on the fleet. So he has no price information directly from Cummins, either.
Stirk, a former chairman of ATA's Technology & Maintenance Council, is aware of Cummins' assurances that EGR technology is ready, but "everybody tends to do that because they know that sales are going to go in the toilet."
Return to main story
