citycat:
I’ve been reading the ‘Should I buy a 2015 Iveco thread’ and your various comments about different makes of truck, with trim falling off, warning lights illuminating on the dash, the cost of replacement modules etc.Our cleaner’s husband is an owner driver. Yeah, I know. ‘Oooh, hark at him admitting he has a cleaner’. It’s just that the West Wing was getting a bit too much for my wife to cope with.
Anyway, he’s on his third unit now since going down the OD route. Started with a Renault Premium, then a Scania R something, and now he’s on a DAF XF. All bought second or third hand from dealers. All of them have gone wrong at some point with electrical modules or other stuff going wrong. Each time, he’s either been persuaded to upgrade to another unit at an extra cost of about 30,000 euros over all three, or paid out about 12,000 euros in repairs or tyres to all three.So the thread got me to thinking about my own truck. When I joined the company in January 2017 as a fresh faced novice, I was allocated an MAN TGX of 2012 vintage which I’ve had ever since, and is just shy of 900,000kms on the clock. Don’t ask me the engine size, I never bothered to find out. It’s a 4 something anyway. Throughout the four and a half years I’ve been driving it, the only time it’s been in the garage is when it’s having its annual service and APK (Dutch version of the MOT), or it has gone to Euromaster for new tyres. The only warning lights that illuminate on the dash are when it’s telling me a headlight or tail light bulb has gone. No trim has fallen off, there are no rattles or squeaks, and after a day of heavy cleaning when I first got it, the cab looks like it did when it first came from the dealership and has aged well (apart from a bloody grease mark left by an agency driver
). The gearbox makes a bit of a clunk in one or two gears when changing down, but basically the unit drives without incident week in week out, year in year out and never has a problem. I’m thinking if the cleaner’s husband had had my truck from the very beginning, he’d have saved himself a load of cash.
So, am I just lucky in not having a lemon? Or are TGX’s just very good trucks overall? I can’t believe my one just goes on and on like the Duracell Bunny without any issues. Do any of you have an older unit from various makes where it continues to drive well each year and has no expensive issues? Or have I just been lucky?
I spend most of my very rookie days in a 18t Man rigid. 69 plate with 300+ or so. No error messages in general, at least not fake ones like DAF. I like them the most to be fair apart from
the gigantic steering wheel. It seems to me in my (very limited) experience that they’re the most reliable.
I got stuck on a ramp once because a transmission malfunction but a couple of restarts later it worked, that was about it in 4 months while I’ve been working there