Thursday, May 20, 2021, at 5 p.m. Eastern time, this live panel discussion and Q&A offered a variety of ways to combat owner-operators' maintenance issues related to the emissions control systems in post-2007 emissions-spec heavy-duty diesels. The panel featured business consultant and Overdrive contributor Gary Buchs, Pittsburgh Power founder Bruce Mallinson, and Jeff Gray of Pontiac, Illinois, who runs an independent shop, Gray's Garage.
Gray notes his shop works "on all makes and models of heavy-duty trucks and trailers" now, more than half a century since his father, Roger Gray, founded the garage in 1963. Gray started working in 1976 and, as with Mallinson, has persevered through the "evolution of electronics in the automotive industry. ... You have to know how the system works and how it is wired, because there are many things that can cause" a fault code other than bad underlying components.
For many trucking today, Buchs said, it feels like "what we know about these systems is they work, or they don't work. And there's often little in between."
Since the first trucks with diesel particulate filters came into production in 2007, the systems have no doubt improved. It's not hard to find a truck owner with a million miles on an emissions-equipped engine who's done little in the way of repair work other than basic recommended maintenance, such as DPF ash cleaning. Manufacturer recommendations on service intervals for those DPFs have extended out many hundreds of thousands of miles, furthermore.
