Editorial: Getting Fleets to Buy ’07 Engines

here can be no doubt that there will be a pre-buy of Class 8 trucks before the next generation of diesel engines is introduced for the 2007 model year, as mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

What is unknown is how significant the pre-buy would be and how long fleets would hold off before committing to purchases of the new, lower-emission models.

The best way to minimize disruption of the purchase-and-maintenance cycle of the nation’s truck fleet and avoid roiling the market for producers of trucks is for lawmakers to embrace the notion of financial incentives. The government must encourage fleets, in a concrete way, to buy the new engines, which are expected to cost around $8,000 more than current models, yet offer less fuel efficiency.

chneider National, No. 7 on the Transport Topics 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian carriers, already has its plans firmly in place. The Wisconsin-based carrier plans to buy 50% more new trucks than usual this year and next so it won’t have to buy any in 2007.

According to Steve Duley, vice president of purchasing, Schneider is concerned about the higher prices, lower fuel economy and unknown reliability of the coming models.

At the Bear Stearns Global Transportation Conference in New York City earlier this month, Duley said Schneider is waiting to see if Congress and the White House agree to provide help.

While they wouldn’t alter the fleet’s decision to accelerate its truck-buying in 2005 and 2006, Duley said, “incentives would influence when we would start buying the ’07 engines.”

Duley said many of the early models of the last reduced-emission engines, introduced in 2002, had problems. And while engine and truck makers eventually fixed all those problems, he said the fleets never fully recovered associated costs caused by the disruption to their businesses.

So, he said, the company would hold off as long as it could before buying new equipment, unless incentives help defray the higher costs.

And Schneider is a bellwether fleet, one of the companies that many other trucking operations look to for leadership on issues such as this.

learly, the best way to persuade fleets to buy the cleaner-burning engines that will come with ’07 truck models is for the government to reward the companies that are willing to take the plunge and buy them when they come on the market.

We hope that Congress and the White House agree.

This editorial appeared in the May 23 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.