There is no perfect toy. You do the research and take your best guess. It looks good, enjoy the adventures.
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MaxxForce 7
- Thread starter ToSlow
- Start date
I don't think a gas engine is available in that chassis series. The Ford gas engines are an option on the F53 or Workhorse Chassis but I think that Freightliner is a 7 series chassis (22.5 wheels). Besides those rigs are heavy and need some grunt to get them going. Turbo Diesels are good at grunt.
Bit of a misconception, or at least an old one. Yes, there's a little more maintenance, but not so much as to not make the fuel savings and power benefits worth it if you're actually travelling more than 5000km a year in the thing.
The thing with diesels is that shops see them as money pigs for no valid reason much of the time. Bring in a 90's Chevy 3/4 ton gasser with a 350 for an oil change and it'll be a run of the mill $50-$75 deal like any other pickup. Bring them a 90's 3/4 with a diesel and suddenly the shop wants $200 for that same oil change even though it's only a few extra L of oil, the same filter as the gasser, and the oil itself doesn't cost that much more, either. But they know they can charge more "because diesel". That's why I changed my own oil in my 1 ton for years - cost me about $30 to do it myself with Rotella T (which I also used in the bikes, so win-win) whereas every oil change place wanted north of $200.
Repair costs? Meh, diesels go for many times more miles than a gasser.
And when it comes to power, there is no comparison. There's a reason you don't see gas engines in commercial trucks - there's nothing out there that has the torque necessary to move the weights commercial trucks move.
The recent maintenance headaches have been with the emission control equipment. Anything 2007 or newer will have some combination of a DPF and a de-NOx catalyst of some sort. There may be a throttle body and an EGR system. The high exhaust temperatures necessary for initiating DPF regeneration (burning off accumulated carbon) introduced operating conditions for the turbocharger that were outside historical norms. Common-rail fuel injection systems are now universally used, but if that system has any variation of a Bosch CP4 high-pressure fuel pump (HPFP), watch out. After the experiences of many recent VW diesel owners (prior to VW getting in emission-control hot water with those very same engines), I refuse to own any vehicle that has a Bosch CP4-series HPFP. (The older CP3 is a completely different design and is OK. Before VW had to buy back and flatten a whole bunch of these cars, some enterprising people came up with a retrofit kit to fit a CP3 to a VW TDI ... the CP4 was that bad.)
My last VW diesel was a model year 2006. It had a cooled EGR system and an oxidizing catalyst - that's it. I considered the newer ones to be too complicated for their own good.
If driven too lightly and/or for short trips, DPFs clog up. Best operating condition is highway speed and long-ish trips with occasional full load up a hill or accelerating, so that the system hardly ever has to do an active regeneration. In an RV or medium/heavy truck, highway speed should be enough load on the engine for this.
My last VW diesel was a model year 2006. It had a cooled EGR system and an oxidizing catalyst - that's it. I considered the newer ones to be too complicated for their own good.
If driven too lightly and/or for short trips, DPFs clog up. Best operating condition is highway speed and long-ish trips with occasional full load up a hill or accelerating, so that the system hardly ever has to do an active regeneration. In an RV or medium/heavy truck, highway speed should be enough load on the engine for this.
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