GearheadGrrrl

Intel from my Euro blogger friends suggests that Volvo has called an emergency board meeting at Goatburg HQ for early a.m. on April 1st. There was also a lot of activity at the Allentown courthouse on friday afternoon with the process servers working overtime, and the Sheriff has been put on alert for an eviction at large industrial facilities on April 1st. Meanwhile, Allentown animal control officers have been dispatched to South Carolina for a transport, curiously they signed out the Mayor's limo instead of their usual van with the cages in back...

Congratulations, most owner operators don't last that long!

We need more truckers like you that will park their truck before they'll haul a money losing load!

I have to admit, it's cute! Wouldn't care to be seen in it, much less drive it, though...

http://macktrucks.com/default.aspx?pageid=9643 That don't look like a Cummins/Westport ISX engine... Somebody at Mack PR needs to be a bit more careful in matching the pix to the text. Maybe we should volunteer to take over Mack's PR... We couldn't do much worse!

IIRC, Volvo just announced a natural gas 13 liter engine...

My take: Looks like Volvo salespeople got jealous of the Titan and demanded their own version. I suspect the VNX will be a disaster- If the 16 liter engine needed a bigger radiator and a jacked up cab to stay cool in a Mack, how does Mack expect the same D16 to stay cool and survive with the same cab and radiator as their 13 liter engine uses?

The B model must be the skinniest and slipperiest Mack ever built, maybe with a tweaked E7 and the the 5 speed overdrive with the .60 top gear...

A lot of the decline in sales is due to truckers switching to intermodal for the long hauls, thus they're not putting 750,000 miles on a tractor in five years and trading it off.

Depends on the specs- It is possible to spec a CX and a Volvo that are near identical but for the cab. That said, the MR and LE are still pretty much Mack designs, never having been switched over to the Volvo chassis. It's also possible to spec a real Mack triple countershaft transmission, double reduction axles, and bogie, though many Mack salespeople will try to talk you out of it. But the handwriting is on the wall- the Mack conventional cab has been around for over two decades now and will ultimately get replaced with a Volvo cab, and I doubt Volvo will tolerate the boxy MR and LE cabs forever when they have something more sexy from Renault to offer...

Depends... On the USPS single axle MRs, the air ride rode no better than the spring. On the UPS tractors I've driven, all single axles with spring, the air ride cab made them reasonably comfy even though they had spring ride.

The Postal Service facility I used to work at used to run their Macks with E7s to around 600k miles, and those were city miles, so typical hours were around 20k or more. Very seldom did those E7s ever need engine work, and I don't remember as much as an inframe. A few Postal Service facilities hung on to there's even longer, I saw '91 E7s with 800k to 900k that still hadn't been even inframed. At UPS any tractor getting up around a million miles would probably be scrapped if the engine needed a rebuild, but I saw plenty of E7s with up to 1,400,000 miles still running. Often they were scrapped with their engines still running fine, simply because they'd been replaced with a new tractor.

Back when the 237s came out in the 60s all the big diesels routinely got inframed around 500k miles. Heck, at Continental Baking it was SOP to inframe a Detroit at only 400k miles. Thanks to longer gearing and other improvements, the later E6s and E7s often did a million miles before the heads even came off.

The only parties that benefitted from deregulation were the big shippers.

Single axle municipal trucks with top loader axles are very popular in the northeast.

Drove a the KW version of the Worker a bit in the 80s... Was kinda weird to get into the cab and see the same switchgear and such as the VW Rabbit diesel I'd driven to work!

There's am owner operator in southern MN who bought a tandem conventional with the V8 new. I haven't seen him in a few years, but last I heard he had 1,300,000 miles on the Scania with an engine rebuild at 800,000.

I agree- the problem is probably low power output from the engine and/or misprograming of the transmission. When you have the Allison reprogrammed, you might want to ask them to make sure 1st gear isn't locked out and have two programs, performance and economy, programmed into the transmission. I drove a Postal Service Mack with a mere 300 HP and an Allison and even at 80K gross weight it did fine.

The 8LL manual won't make it any faster- the splits are about the same as the Allison's. If the Allison is upshifting too early, etc. you can shift it manually or have it reprogrammed. Also, the Allison can have multiple shifting programs- touch the "program" button and see if it makes any difference,

Bein' a mutt ain't so bad when most of the competition is mutts... Navistar is a disaster, Daimler don't get it, and Paccar would still be another assembled truck if DAF hadn't gifted them an engine.

I suppose I could have done a glowing review of a new Mack with Volvo's Mdrive and Meritor axles, but I don't have to rely on Mack/Volvo for ad revenue!

Discussed over at my blog, http://www.gearheadgrrrl.com

Welcome, fellow Mack addict!

As far as exporters sucking up all the old Macks, that may be true at the ports but not in the midwest- Out here it's rust, not exporters, that's eating up our old Macks. Keep in mind too that the CHs have gotten old enough that overseas buyers can buy them for the same price as an R model, so the CHs are the bulk of the exports now and the Rs are getting ignored. And someone said that old Macks don't matter to Volvo? Today's old Mack buyer, if he has good experiences with the brand, will be back in a few years when he has more dollars to buy a new Mack. Provided the good ol' boys on this site don't chase said future Mack customer off...

Agreed, the Allisons are bulletproof, seen them run dry and still survive. I'm still leary of the Volvo mDrive though- read some comments on an Aussie forum the other day reporting that Volvo is rebuilding a lot of them under warranty at around the million kilometer mark, Maxitorques are usually good for at least a million MILES!