Editorial: Resolving 2010 Engine Technology

This Editorial appears in the Nov. 5 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

It’s clear that buyers will face a choice when they consider the 2010 model year for heavy-duty trucks. What remains to be seen is whether this choice benefits truck operators as well as suppliers.

Cummins Inc. and Navistar International have announced their intention to comply with the next change in the Environmental Protection Agency’s emission requirements by updating the same technology they’ve used since 2003 to meet the first two steps of a three-step program.

Some form of this technology, exhaust gas recirculation, is currently in use by all major U.S. heavy-duty engine makers.

Europe-based Volvo AB — with its two U.S. brands, Volvo and Mack — and Daimler Trucks — with its Freightliner, Western Star and Sterling brands — have said they will add selective catalytic reduction to meet the 2010 restrictions on nitrogen oxides.

Caterpillar and Paccar Inc. have yet to announce their technology paths.

The key characteristic of SCR is that it injects a mixture of urea and water into the exhaust stream to cleanse residual NOx emissions. This requires trucks to have another storage tank, for the urea solution. Drivers will have to ensure the tank has fluid in it, or the truck will lose power.

This has raised concerns in some quarters that urea may be hard to find and the extra tank will add weight and cost to new trucks.

Several analysts quoted in this week’s Transport Topics (see story, p. 1) said they thought competing technologies would be good for buyers by offering fleets a choice and by encouraging suppliers to keep prices down.

If competing technologies reduce buyer anxiety and give them less cause to rush to update their equipment with existing technology so as to avoid the new engines, it will indeed be good for the industry. Nobody needs another pre-buy.

What wouldn’t be good is if the situation creates the kind of split that divided video cassette recorders between the Beta and VHS formats some years back. Many consumers withheld purchases, waiting for the market to decide which format would survive, on the theory that both couldn’t make it. And, of course, VHS won.

Certainly, we’ve not heard the last word in the race to design engines that meet EPA’s 2010 regulations, but don’t scare potential buyers into keeping their wallets closed.