Why are International trucks soo cheap?

come on just wait till they start screaming how wonderfull the electrics are

 

Ahhhh hell if you aint driving an oshkosh or an ole P16 witha a 16v71TI you're in a peddlecar with your dad's sunglasses on dreaming a dream . Pfff.

 

A lot of people dont do the math. They just see newer = better. Lemme do a napkin math example. First a new truck using the quote i just got is $220,000 for one speced out how i need and its not too crazy either. Just a basic 18 speed 500 horse cummins powered 567 with 3.72 gears and a midroof big sleeper. We will use this as the average as a 567 is a pretty standard plastic truck.

Assumeing 25% down and a fairly average intrest of 13% over 5 years (yes i know its lower for some but im using the average here). Your looking at $60,000 in intrest and a $3800 payment and total note payment of $280K with interest assumeing its not compounding or other things in the background.

Assumeing you flip the rig at 3 years thats $36,000, however atm 500k or less used rigs with the same specs are selling for around 70K on the market and less at auction. So you will have paid $192K by the time of trade in if financed. Again using AVERAGE numbers.

If you flip the truck that starts all over. Again and again and again.

If you KEEP your truck even assumeing it needs a new engine transmission and diffs at every 1 million, your looking at 100k every 10ish years. Engine 40k, transmission 15k difs, all the other repairs you also get 30k for stuff like wireing harnesses 5th wheels and so on and this is discounting a lot of that can be rebuilt multiple times for far less then replacment cost.

So lets be pessimistic and assume 3 entire powertrain replacments over your quoted 20 years. Thats 300k over 20 years. The guy buying new trucks every 3 years and rounding DOWN to be generious will have paid around 1.2 MILLION dollars over 20 years.

Lets go ahead and dig this nail a biiiiit deeper too. Lets assume 100k miles a year and a hood gets 4.5 MPG at $5 a gallon. The hood will have paid $2.225 million over 20 years in fuel rounded UP. An aero cab at 7.25 as someone threw out like facts will have paid 1.375 million in 20 years. Rounded DOWN. so a 850K diffrence making the long nose as bad as posible and the aero cab as good as posible.

So over 20 years including the purchase price on a new truck and assumeing worst case everything, a long nose will have cost 2.825 million.

Swapping to a new rig every year for an aerocab would have cost 2.575 million or a total diffrence of $250,000 in favor of flipping trucks with old iron as the benchmark and in the absolute worst case for them against aerocabs using absolute best case numbers.

If you use the best case "long nose" numbers of 5.45 or national overall average of 6 foe MPG. Assume a far more reasonable rebuild only schedule.... suddenly that entire thing flips on its head dont it. Throw on maintaince costs, ease of repairs, parts shortages, emissions issues, and the ability to just park the #### thing and wait for conditions to improve or just do something else and everything else that needs considering and at best its so close a fight its personal prefrence. At worst old iron wins every time.

I dont know, my bullfrog looks pretty unique for an aero truck. Then again i actully am quite fond of my junk heap and its not exactly a stock cookie cutter build anymore.