An old man's career goes flat, Snackbar moves to open deck

A hand full of them have problems. Most of them are lighter, less expensive, and get much better mileage in my limited experience. We had x15’s have injector issues

Ive always said the quickest way to run off a driver is mess with his home time or his money. Well we are at least batting 50/50.

 

As someone that works with one of the largest specialty truck dealers using Paccar platforms the reality is that often the customer does not have a choice. Both Peterbilt and Kenworth have limited numbers of build slots with Cummins motors and force the Paccar units down the dealer's throats.

As a second stage manufacturer (fancy term for truck builder or upfitter) we are give X number of build slots each year for the upcoming models. Across all of those build slots we then are given a limited number of Cummins engine options and have to be really picky about which slots get those motors because once they are gone there are gone for the entire model year across all the models we sell.

This allotment of alternate motors applies across all of our Pete and KW slots and we build everything from small tow trucks on the T270 all the way up to 5 axle rotators/heavy duty wreckers on Pete 567 and KW T880 or W990's and a whole lot of 9 car haulers on the Pete 589. For model year 25 we get one Cummins to every 3.5 Paccar engines we spec, so many of our customers are not getting the option for anything other than a Paccar engine.

I imagine it is about the same for every Pete or KW dealer out there in the US, and forget about it in Canada as they even have transmission type/model restrictions on dealers now!

 

If customers start refusing to buy their ####ty products, they’ll either be forced to change their options or go bust. But of course that will never happen because we can never have nice things

 

The Paccar engine is a MAN (european). I believe Paccar purchased MAN so that they would also have a proprietary engine. I agree that Scania certainly has some appeal.

 

Unfortunately Cummins know it and they are notoriously difficult to work with when the do have an issue. They also weigh more and burn more fuel and we all know how that goes over with todays fleets…

 

All of our 2021 MY 389 4-axles are having injector issues -- X15 605/2050

Something with the injector is cut wrong and they dump too much fuel while prematurely clogging the filters. They get sent for a rebuild/renozzle/reprogram and the DPF gets cleaned.

I hope Cummins found this issue before the 2024 MY I have. If not, 250k and it'll be another worthless engine. None of our 565/2050 3-axle trucks appear to have this issue.

 

It isn't Cummins, it is Paccar making the restrictions on how many non-Paccar engines they will install in any given dealer's production runs.