A popular Canadian vlogger I watch is an owner operator and drives a volvo, not sure what the exact model is but a few weeks ago his truck hit 1 million kilometers which is about 600,000 miles. It’s still going strong and he doesn’t seem to have any fear of it breaking down or becoming unreliable anytime soon which makes me think he’s expecting to get at least another few hundred thousand miles from it.
So how is it that trucks, which are put under way more stress than cars can do twice the miles a car can do? Even then they keep going, probably doing 3 or 4 times the miles. Don’t most cars become super unreliable after about the 200k mile mark, even with regular care? What specifically is it about truck engines that allows them to crunch through the miles compared to a car?
Engine revolutions and lubrication, your missus does the car more harm taking the kids to school and getting their hair done, Think Boeing. Think Ships. Think Big. Million mile Atkinsons killed their drivers first [emoji23]
I’m going to guess and say that truck is quite old, meaning it probably doesn’t have all the asthmatic inducing emissions controls like modern truck engines have like DPF and EGR etc. Trucks are usually chewing up the miles on a motorway, not stop-start traffic in towns and cities which puts a lot more wear on an engine.
The sad reality is, car these days are only designed for a set life cycle. Meaning, the engineering and components chosen are a balance of cost vs mileage the part will last for. Typically most cars these days are designed to hit 100-150K miles and that’s it.
There are a few exceptions but productions of those engines typically ended in mid 200X or earlier. For example the Volvo D5 Euro 3 engine, VW 1.9 PD TDI, Toyota petrol 4.0, 4.3, 4.7 V8 engines. Even some of the smaller Toyota petrol engines in the Corolla for example were known to go a long way. The most recent engine I know that was good for 200+K miles was the Honda 2.2 Diesel lump but even that pales in comparison to the mileage an older truck engine can achieve.
Trucks are designed with cost in mind, but they’ve got to hit much higher mileages or simply wouldn’t be competitive in the market, so more engineering and better quality of components are allowed by the bean counters. They’re usually designed for more extreme environments too, making 1 truck to operate in Northern Europe as well as Africa makes production easier compared to redesigning components “to save cost” So you’ll find the cooling systems on trucks in the UK are way over kill, as well as in cab heating systems as examples of this. We wont have block heaters in the UK but you can be sure the threaded holes to hook up the heaters are there, just blocked off. There are ofcourse exceptions for bought in parts, like batteries where costs can be cut by speccing smaller capacity batteries in the UK as “it never gets that cold” for example.
If you get onto agency work once you get your Class 2, you’ll probably find you’re given the older and usually higher mileage trucks in the yard when you start. I had a Daf LF 18 Tonne Automatic a while back for a shift, it had 1.2 Million miles on it and still seemed to pull strong. The company used the volume of the box, never getting anywhere close to the weight limit of the truck.
I know of a truck doing regular cross channel work on two and a half million kliks.
I doubt thats a record, but is very respectable for a full time working truck. Regular maintenance, a driver with mechanical sympathy, and most modernish trucks and cars are capable of high miles. As has been said, the toughest time for an engine is when it is run too cold, or too hot. Keep it trundling along happily and itll keep going.
Wheel Nut:
Engine revolutions and lubrication, your missus does the car more harm taking the kids to school and getting their hair done, Think Boeing. Think Ships. Think Big. Million mile Atkinsons killed their drivers first [emoji23]
If you look at the fact that a new unit is £100k plus and a new average family car is about £12k to £20k, that shows that the truck is built better and used better quality components than cars. More time and money spent developing it, better engineering. Also like has been said, if Scania or Volvo put out a truck that did 200k miles and then became problematic and constantly needed repairs and components replacing they would soon loose customers and big contracts. Look at the buying power of DHL or wincanton. If they said we aren’t buying your trucks any more that would be huge blow. When companies are putting in multi million pound orders with the truck manufacturers they need assurance they have a reliable truck for 10 years or more, or if it’s a 3 year lease then the manufacture and finance company need to have something reliable they can sell on afterwards having already done a few hundred thousand miles.
I traded my Volvo VNL 780 in at three and a half years old simply because it was coming up to 800,000kms and 800,000kms is where the factory warranty runs out.
It would have hit one million kms the following year and was still fine having given no trouble.
I should seriously hope any truck would last a lot longer than four years. The new series of Volvo have factory warranties running for 1.2 million kms which tempted me but I was persuaded to buy Peterbilt this time around and it is also doing good so far although it is still early days at one year old and 240,000kms to date.
The company that I pull for have many Peterbilt trucks ranging from brand new to 10+ years old and some of the older ones have over three million kms on them!
Most wagons are looked after better than cars.
I bet most people on here don’t check their car every day before they drive it, but will think nothing of spending 10-15 minutes checking over their wagon every morning.
This means small defects get spotted, and hopefully fixed, before they become bigger issues.
Also wagons are supposed to be inspected/serviced much more often than cars (especially older cars, as most people stop properly maintaining their cars once they have finished paying for them!). I know off the top of my head when my wagon is due its next inspection. Just like I know the expiry dates of cab and tank SLPs, and of the eye wash bottles and fire extinguishers. I have no clue when my car is due a service or MOT without having to look through the service book first, and I’d bet a lot of people on here would be the same
My factory warranty runs till 600,000 miles or 966,000 km and the gearbox warranty runs till 1.2 million km, it’s a Detroit dd15.
Most engines are expected to run until at least 1 million miles if properly looked after but the emissions systems are normally the weak point and can generate some pretty crazy bills.
There’s a lot less congestion here of course, and the load weight limits are lighter. The trucks here are still pretty traditional with disc brakes being rare and untrusted new fangled things, a great resistance to auto clutch gearboxes, most people here would choose a manual unsynchronized 10 or 13 speed antique box and almost no one would dream of using single tyres on an axle, obviously duals are vital.
But the greatest heresy of all is to suggest one driven axle is sufficient and lift axles have a place on trucks, that’ll get you committed.
Also trucks tend to run for longer at operating temp.
Wheras a car is often stop start nipping to the shops never fully getting up to optimum temp.
You can easily find example of motorway cars that have done 200k+ miles that still feel new though. These are often a great buy if the model is good and its not too old. Whereas you can easily find examples of cars with lower mileage with a host of issues. But that can be due to a variety of reasons.
Ladder chassis and beam axles is a big part of it combined with just the general larger dimensions. Which means they’re easier to work on, with good access, and require less labour to replace parts and larger dimension parts are easier to more reliably engineer in the first place. Also very rare for new unreliable tech to be introduced most new models are often little more than a few new panels stuck on the same tried and tested cab body. Contrast that with cars that have swirl flaps, variable valve timing and all the rest that generate repair bills large enough for the owner to ditch the car.
Also, I am sure the question depends very much on the difference regarding what a commercial vehicle and a private car is used for.
It seems like the average car would be showing a lot of wear after say 150,000 miles but consider that during it’s life the average family car would be used for relatively short comuter type journeys starting from cold and shutting down again after maybe 10 or 20 miles at the most.
On the other hand, if you were to buy the same car and set it to running between Leeds and London day in and day out right from day one and were to also maintain it properly which would probably require a service and oil change every couple of weeks I bet you could get 400,000 miles out of it before it was worn out.
Cars even many small commercial vehicles won’t do the mileage a truck does in a year, so it will take many year for them to rack up proper high mileage, my car is 15 years old and has 180,000 miles, a truck could does this in 2 or 3 years. I’ve got rid of cars in the past with decent engines, but time and salt has taken a toll of the bodywork.
I owned a Peugeot 405 diesel once, ex taxi and that had nearly 400k miles on it - original engine and box. Occasional head gasket and a clutch or two but still going strong.
A place where I used to work has an '03 plate Daf 7.5 - it’s got to have about 1.4 m klicks on it by now - still has all the original major components.
Not bad for a little truck - somehow I can’t see the Canter/Fuso brigade matching that - my ex place had one of those as well - it was completely worn out at 7 years old and way less than a third of the mileage at around 450k.
In the end nobody would drive the thing - it kept going into limp mode (and that was 20 mph ) - just great when on the hills of the A34. Merc couldn’t fix it so it was scrapped.
When I was on DHL we used to change the trucks every three/four years as they would do up to 250,000 km a year, trunking between DCs and suppliers, 6 days a week, 24 hrs a day.
We had only up to 18 t , 7.5t and vans upto 3.5t .
All got changed at 3 years old . They varied from 300k to 550k+
We had very few problems with the larger vehicles but some of the merc vans were constantly throwing up faults .
Most commercial engines are only lightly stressed in comparison to car engines .
1.2 turbo car engines often develop over 140bhp .
Thats over 100bhp per litre .
How the big boys would love their 14ltr artic to have 1400-1500 bhp , foot down friday would be fun .
The engines can produce this power easily but they wouldn’t last and the economy would be terrible.
) - just great when on the hills of the A34. Merc couldn’t fix it so it was scrapped.