Flatbed/freightliner buyers: Coronado or cascadia . . . Which would you order/buy?

Completely skipped over the Southern California part of the post... Good call!

 

53Step,

If you are interested in the Cascadia, talk to members like Cpape or Flatbed. Cpape owns a fleet of them and Flatbed runs his own trucking company. I'll alert Cpape to this thread.

KH

 

We are a very cost conscious company. There would be no discussion between 2 trucks if one offered a full MPG better. Please think long and hard about the opportunity to put $5-10K additional toward you bottom line while spending LESS on the truck. Most large carriers would pay $2K to save $4K.

We have no experience with the Coronado. 50% of our company trucks are Cascadia with DD13s. We are an open deck company. We run the Eastern half of the country. We mostly pull heavy and unaerodynamic loads. We have not seen the fuel economy we were expecting from the Cascadias. We did much better with the Columbias with Mercedes engines. Problem was the motors weren't designed for our application.

My brother JDP would have a more informed opinion than I do.

 

I actually feel that you would see better MPG out of the DD15 engine considering the work you do and terrain you run the loads on. More HP equates to better MPG.

 

The young lad is trying to convince the old bull of the same thing. We will see what kind of luck he has. From my perspective, I am always concerned about increasing weight...but I will deal with it if we can add .25 mpg.

 

If you only hauled fiberglass tanks or sheet metal duct work, the lower HP engine would do ya fine. But pulling the heavy equipment, steel plates, and the fact your guys run the Cumberland Gap quite a bit, would need some bigger HP engines. The less the motor works, the more MPG ya get. My FLD i was running before was set at 430hp and i was pulling those tanks for QC. I was able to manage 8.7mpg on the entire trip everytime. i had them take it down to 390HP thinking it would help, and it dropped me down to 7.2mpg.... I had them change it back and I got back to my 8.7mpg again and the only change made was the Hp rating in the ECM tune

 

I run a 2010 Cascadia With a DD15 ON the west Coast In a ungoverned truck, Runnng the speed limit what ever it is 55, 65, 75, and getting 6.5 mpg on average. The DD13 is to small for flatbed work.

 

In my opinion the DD15 is better than the cummins ISX freightliner offers on the Cascadia. The one thing I would order is the bigger size DEF tank for so you do not have to fill it up often. Is their any other o/o's or company drivers running DD15 that can chime in??

KH

 

After seeing how good Volvo's with ishift are on fuel/maintenance compared to the Cascadias we run at work, there is a reason all the Crapcadias are being replaced with Volvo's... 1-1.5 mpg better in a local fuel hauling scenario.