Editorial: The 'EPA Engine' Cometh
img src="/sites/default/files/images/articles/printeditiontag_new.gif" width=120 align=right>As the Environmental Protection Agency-mandated deadline requiring a new generation of diesel engines in heavy-duty trucks passes this week, the entire industry involved in making trucks is in disarray and bracing for the worst of times.
After a business boomlet in recent months — caused, ironically, by fleets trying to avoid the perils caused by EPA's inflexibility — truck, engine and component manufacturers are laying off workers and mothballing plants in anticipation of a steep drop in orders.
EPA, in its well-intentioned but misguided drive to improve air quality, has savaged the truck supply industry by inspiring this short-lived jump in orders, at the expense of steady, long-term growth in an industry that was just beginning to revive from the national economic recession.
The trucking industry, like most Americans, supports steps to improve the environment. But EPA's refusal to respond to trucking's concerns — that fleets were being ordered to buy untested engines with no performance history — virtually ensured that trucking executives would find other ways to minimize the risks to their customers and their businesses.
When it became clear that EPA wasn't going to budge, these prudent executives quickly bought up all available trucks that manufacturers could produce before the rules changed. The last of those trucks will be rolling off the assembly lines in the next four weeks or so. In addition, fleet executives bought up virtually all of the remaining low-mileage used trucks from dealer lots in recent months.
Now, fleet officials can be expected to sit back and watch how the new engines work in their own tests, or in the fleets unfortunate enough to have to buy them because they weren't able to buy the last of the old models.
If EPA had agreed to a reasonable delay in the deadline to allow over-the-road testing, most fleets might have chosen the new engines. Increasingly, engine makers report growing confidence in the ultimate reliability and fuel-efficiency of the new models, with some saying that future models will at least perform as well as pre-Oct. 1 engines.
In any event, truck and engine manufacturers can look forward to many more months of empty order books and red ink, unless the economy recovers to such an extent that fleets have to buy new rigs to move a wave of new freight.
It didn't have to be like this.
This article appears in the Sept. 30 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.
