Maintenance numbers for older trucks

@Scooter Jones

Spurred by your recent thread, and with a will to encourage new owner operators to consider pre 2003 trucks,

I finally pulled my numbers this far for the year on my 1995 Peterbilt 379, 12.7 Detroit S60.

Having owned it since May 2017, this is the first full year to pull figures from. And this year is almost toast.

I put all my ‘maintenance ‘ figures in one section, for the CPA’s benefit, but excluding the following items, which I consider ‘upgrades ‘ . . .

- ECM repair and tune, was running fine before, but was PM’ed and turned up - $1100 odd

- Gen set major component failure and repair, to be expected with 120” sleeper requirements, but unfair to basic truck/sleeper equivalent. $2,600 odd.

- Trailer boxes and installation. Aside from truck maintenance requirements.

- An expensive swap to Fleet Air filters from non compatible OEM setup. Both breathers and filters , $ 2,500+

. . . $13,204.82. On 66,794 miles YTD.

.20 cpm

Total figure including all above upgrades - $22,247 - .33cpm

Well over half the cash went to my independent mechanic - about $9,000.

So - 23 year old truck costs about.20 cpm in maintenance. Not saying anybody starting up shop should buy a 23 year old POS like mine, but there you go. Facts.

One could possibly extrapolate figures running 100k miles/ year, though as miles go up, so do some maintenance costs.

Please post your maintenance numbers if you have hard trustworthy data for others to compare.

B.

 

This is the POS in reference, by the way.

 

Look , you Cascadia loving Yankee, you . . .

 

Numbers will be close - not looking at running much freight till year end.

Good point - Set of 10 tires made up $4,000 or so. These will last well through next year.