ya somebody always does. I had an off brand asphalt roller that they hadn't made in twenty years and CAT had bought the rights to sell parts for them.

just like volvo sells parts for the old autocars.

But also cat is only getting out of the heavy truck market. they do use 3406 motors in equipment too. Many of the parts are the same

I'v got my eye on a KTA cummins which they havn't put into trucks in twenty years but they still use them in boats. Them babies are high dollar though. $17.5k for the USED one I was looking at

Caterpillar has stated they have over 1.25 million engines currently operating in North America as verifyed by registrations tracked by R.L. Polk Company. With that said, I'd hardly worry too much about Cat not supporting their products.
What's really happening is that we as truck owners are getting less choices about what engine we want under our hoods. The Truck OEM's want to limit our choices to their "in house" brands and if we choose an independent engine from either Cat or Cummins, then we pay a huge upcharge for the privilege of choice.
What the OEM's really want is to capture 100% of the parts and service opportunity for themselves. If this continues, I expect both Cat and Cummins will face declining market shares in the future.
We, on the other hand, will see less choice and increased reliance on the truck mfgs for not only what they do for us today, but in addition will be the primary source of our engine repairs.
That may a scary thought, because none of them, in my view, has a well trained and complete network of dealers capable of responding as well as independent suppliers like Cat and Cummins do.
We are being forced to accept the European model of trucks where the options are few, and you get little sense of urgency when repairs are needed.

Speaking of parts I have a theory..... because of declining new truck sales the OEMs are jacking their parts prices AT LEAST 25% if not more. Any body else notice this?

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I agree the 3406e model was the best engine CAT ever produced, I have a 96 Freightshaker with that E-motor and it still runs like a top even after 900k with no rebuild yet lol. My new truck has that VED which is AWESOME

The sales in the heavy duty market for Cummins has dropped of 46% this past year, but yet cummins has 41% of the market share of Heavy duty engines sold in the US. Sure everyone is having issues. It just depends on how badly they want to fix those issuses. I can tell you that I am doing my part to try to fix the issuses with Cummins engines. People are going to have less confidence in the newer emission regulated engines than they have in the past. This is natural. But I bet that if you give it time it will get better.

hard to give it time when you can't make a living because your truck is in the shop more than not

I am sorry that what I wrote seems to come from the wrong side of the fence. The one thing that I have learned is that no matter how much you test an engine or engine system you can never really figure everything out. I use to think that 2-3 years was enough testing before I got into the field that I am in. That doesn't even sratch the surface. By the time that the company finds out from the government what the next round of emission requirments are they only have 4 years or less to develope an engine and engine system that both meets the emission requirments and meets durability and drivability issues. When you figure out one thing and fix it that fix may have an adverse affect on another componet that you did not expect. Then you have real world testing and that takes man power and time. When you have a limited number of these brand new future meeting emission engines you can only do so much testing and then you have to release an engine that meets requirments or pay fines. CAT rushed their product, at least that is what it looks from my angle of what I have seen and read. I am sorry that the trucks are breaking down for no apparent reason and that the dealers can't fix them and then there is the fact that you all aren't making money just sitting there. I understand what you wrote and why you wrote, you buy a brand new truck and it is a "lemon" and the dealer can't fix it or they have no solutions for a nation wide product. It shouldn't happen but it does and like I said before I am doing my part to make that not happen. I hope you can see things from my point of view because I can understand where you are coming from, I deal with it monthly unfortunetly. Things being sold that aren't designed to do what they are and then they come to us to make them work.

I didn't mean to imply it is your fault. I lay it at the feet of the govrnment personally. I'm all for improvements but it was too big of a jump too fast. I don't understand what we are gaining by reducing emmisions at the cost of decreasing fuel use by ...what, 20%?
Seems like a net loss to me

Well it happens with car engines back in the 80's too. New emission regulation produces engines like a 5.0l V8 that makes wheezing 170hp that consumes as much gas as it was when producing 250 or more hp.

The scary thing is, it takes well over 10 years for the automakers to finally make good performing engines that are using less gas (and little emission) that we have today. And it takes the Japanese to prove that this is possible. With no Japanese competition and just less competition in general for heavy truck engine industry, who knows when it'll reach this?

Maybe this would be the time some foreign competition could finally made inroad in American truck industry?

My nephew's father-in-law has an '08 with a Cat. It wouldn't auto-regen. He had to pull over a couple of times and manually regen. It's been in the shop since Monday afternoon and everybody from Cat was on it trying to figure out what's going on with the computer. The techs can auto-regen if they hook it up to their system but still wouldn't do it on its own.

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