What us your opinion over horsepower? 500 v 455

The more horse a engine has the less work it has to do to lift 40 ton up and over a mountain. You will also do it closer to the speed limit upgrade in a timely manner. Instead of being all wound out grinding up at 20 mph for hours burning 30 gallons a hour and overheating everything.

When you have a big horse engine, you don't have to do very much of anything with that foot. She will simply walk off and do whatever you like in a timely manner. In addition to holding the speed limit in annoying rolling hills of Midwest etc.

Less fuel is hooey and I tell you why, again big horse less effort. Two, all trucks still get almost 7 mpg after 50 years from being at 5 something per gallon. Not much of a difference.

I would be putting in 800 horse and 2000 torque engines in trucks if I owned any. None of that tired 470 crap.

 

Edited.

There isnt too many thoughts I have.

Except one.

In our 2000 freightliner Century with the 515 Detriot we put about 221000 miles on it in 10 months as a team. FFE bought approximately 85000 dollars in fuel to us. (Excluding reefer) That came out to about 10.25 a hour in fuel over 8000+ engine hours. Or 3 gallons a hour average.

Or looked at another way, we would at times move from Avenel NJ to Holbrook AZ before fueling there westbound for LA. The one time we did that option left us with 6 gallons in the tank. Cutting it kinda fine against my usual 2100 mile range limit for 345 gallon tanks.

 

I run a 485hp Cummins, 13 speed ultrashift plus, 3.55 rears.

Knoxville, TN to Lebanon, PA to West Mifflin, PA to Hubbard, OH. Between 1,050 - 1,125 miles on the hub (don't remember the exact number), 145 gallons burned.

By math, 1050 ÷ 145 = 7.24 and a bunch mpg. With 39,000 lbs on the deck rolling I-81, not too shabby. Not great, by any means...but not too shabby. And that was rolling a smooth, steady 65mph the whole way. Minus, of course, construction zones and speed zones. I'm addicted to doing either 65mph or the posted speed limit, whichever is lower. I prefer to keep my money, it beats paying the state in speeding fines or excessive fuel costs.

 

ty kindly. I'll edit my post to clean it up a little on my end.

 

I agree with these numbers.

I prefer to run the speed limit which is a few mph faster. We got in our century about 6.8 average over 7 on good days and in certain specific western areas approached 16 mpg for a few hours at a time east bound which was really good due to the winds pushing us. The automatic had alot to do with that because in a manual I tend to use the entire engine RPM range from idle all the way to redline at times.