The first two parts of this year’s series examining the Environmental Protection Agency’s diesel emissions regulations’ impact on pricing and reliability for equipment over two decades focused largely on markets for new Class 8s, yet the survey that prompted the series underscored a longstanding reality. Most owner-operators, including 67% of respondents to that survey, acquire their trucks in the used market. There, supply and demand have taken a rollercoaster ride over the last four years from the highest of demand highs post-pandemic back to a degree of normalcy today.
Used-truck demand’s cooled fast with the freight markets over the last two years, though, as ACT Research’s Steve Tam recently highlighted for attendees of the Used Truck Association’s annual conference. “Trucks are inexpensive right now,” generally speaking, he said. More-recent updates from ACT on used-market retail truck sales showed better-than-expected sales volume results in November, but otherwise underscored the sentiment.
For Overdrive readers with truck-purchase plans on the horizon, the emissions spec generation of those rigs matters — there’s evidence that early-generation aftertreatment equipment’s generally negative reliability reputations have followed those trucks around to this day. As 2024 Overdrive Trucker of the Year-contending owner-operator Gary Schloo put it, “I wouldn’t touch anything built between 2008 and 2012 or so,” he said. “Those were the early systems.” About that first generation of diesels featuring selective catalytic reduction (SCR) with diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), Schloo added, “they were really problematic, as I watched the company I was leased to get rid of theirs and take a butt-kicking on them” at resale.
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We polled readers this summer about current truck-purchase plans. Very few of those looking at used vehicles signaled intentions to target the model-year ranges with the most negative reputations for emissions-systems problems — trucks that first came outfitted with the diesel particulate filter (DPF), generally in the 2008-’10 model year range, and 2011-’14 diesels introducing SCR aftertreatment with DEF.
Part 1 in this series: EPA 2027 diesel emissions regs: Class 8 truck price hikes in the offing
In Overdrive‘s early-year survey that sparked this series, respondents flagged 2008-’10 and 2011-’14 model year groups among those with the absolute worst reliability reputations. When rating the reliability of their own truck on a scale of 1-10, owners of 2011-’14 trucks scored them the worst of all the model year groups when it comes to reliability on average: 5.7, where 10 is “totally reliable” and 1 “totally unreliable.”
Those early years of SCR, trucker Joel Morrow noted in part 2 of the series, were marked by a general lack of familiarity with aftertreatment equipment, and uncertainty with regard both to up-front spec’ing and, perhaps more importantly, necessary preventive maintenance (PM) to keep the systems fully functioning as long as possible. A lot has changed in that regard since then — SCR preventive maintenance, for instance, is now a standard annual service offering from TA Truck Service and part of some fleets’ and owner-operators’ routine PM programs.
Other owner-operators take a slightly different tack. Alec Costerus, Morrow’s co-owner in the Alpha Drivers Testing and Consulting business but also their Alpha Drivers Transportation small fleet, spoke to the value he’d found through the years from use of Hot Shot’s Secret’s fuel treatment throughout the life of a 2011 model rig he owned through the 2010s, warding off significant emissions-system maintenance issues simply by achieving a cleaner burn. (Owner-operator Costerus also meticulously avoids idling, well-known as problematic for the entire system.)
Other fuel treatments like those of Clean Air Fleet and Howes, too, have delivered similar results, up to and including reduction in DEF use by the systems.
“Early emissions were way worse than they are now.” –Longtime diesel mechanic Richard Muller
[Related: Fuel treatments increasingly a part of owner-operators’ PM routines]
Yet there are currents working against owners shopping the used market, given knowing just what kind of preventive maintenance routine you’re inheriting with a used truck isn’t exactly a given. Past Used Truck Association President Craig Kendall, general manager of Knoxville, Tennessee, and North Georgia locations of the Pete Store dealer, said there’s huge variability in what customers bring to the table for maintenance/repair records when they sell to his shop.
For instance, “if somebody brings us a truck and they say it’s had an engine overhaul,” he said, “if we don’t have really good documentation” of the work “from a dealer or an engine supplier … I don’t want to advertise it.” It’s easy to say the work’s been done, yet if he can’t prove that engine’s been worked on, it’s not a detail he’ll use to sell a buyer on it. Others, though, might come with “paper stacked longer than my arm,” he added. Still other companies may not be inclined to share their maintenance records worried about liability should they become public.
For buyers, “we encourage customers to get their trucks inspected,” Kendall said, and “we try to do that, too,” top to bottom, including the emissions components. “Some fleets take great care of their stuff,” he added. For others, maintenance is “putting fuel in it.” He went on to cite something of a joke amongst peers in his network:
The lowest-mile truck in a fleet may well be its worst — the high-miles truck its best.
Why? The low-miles rig spent its life having problems and sitting in the shop getting repaired.
Buyer behavior is all over the map when it comes to requesting maintenance records, in his experience. He cited a prospective buyer he recently helped in canvassing the used lot in Knoxville for a “medium-duty truck, and he wanted to put a box on it,” Kendall noted. “I asked him, ‘What is it you’re trying to do?'”
The man had ordered a truck, but was told it would be 10 weeks before arrival, he said, then after waiting a time, manufacturing was put out yet another 10 weeks. Sometimes, maintenance records or not, Kendall said, “some people just need a truck,” and need it now, in essence. “Some have no idea what makes a truck tick. Some want to talk about what kind of washers you’re using. My salespeople have to be ready to talk about details, yet some people really don’t want to.”
Due diligence around the emissions can help evaluation. When Iowa-based owner-operator Candace Marley bought her current truck, a 2020 Peterbilt 579, late in 2023, she had a secret weapon, her business and life partner Richard Muller, with a nearly 40-year history working as a diesel mechanic. He’s employed by Don Hummer Trucking today, yet also performs preventive maintenance for owner-operator Marley and any repairs needed.
Her prior truck was a 2017 Kenworth, and she was in something of a bind after a catastrophic engine failure dumped coolant throughout the fuel system. The 2020 Cummins-powered Pete, on the emissions-equipment side, represented a big upgrade as far as Muller was concerned. “Early emissions were way worse than they are now,” he said, flagging aftertreatment equipment of vintage 2018 to date as “way better.”
Marley’s 2017 Kenworth still had “a lot of the older-style stuff on it,” Marley said, including the “older-style DPF canister, and the older-style fuel-water separator.” Muller’s much more confident in the 2020 model. His biggest piece of advice for her was to find a late-model used truck with a Cummins engine and aftertreatment system. He’d seen problems in others not effectively regenerating to burn off soot in the DPF during operation.
“We take less of a valuation hit on the newer trucks.” –Pete Store General Manager Craig Kendall on relative improvement with the most-recent generation of aftertreatment systems
A driver not paying attention then sees the “DPF plug up, and that creates a cascade of problems,” Muller said.
Increased confidence with Muller’s recommendations notwithstanding, the 2020 579’s “very first repair” needed, Marley said, was replacement of the DEF doser pump. A thorough cleaning of that part of the DEF system, notably, is part of TA Truck Service’s annual recommended emissions-system service to ward off failures in SCR systems.
A prospective used truck buyer, Marley’s experience suggests, should see value in maintenance records that deliver confidence such cleaning, among other effective routine PM, had been peformed throughout the history of a truck outfitted with an SCR system.
[Related: The top 5 diesel fault codes, and emissions issues you can do something about]
Emissions regulations’ impact on long-term equipment value, pricing in used markets
Given the clear impact emissions regulations have delivered to reliability reputations since the introduction of the DPF in 2007, analysis of used-market sales of the various model year groups, organized by generation of emissions equipment, offers a way to show how those reputations play out in bedrock market value.
Anecdotally, emissions systems have played less and less of a role in used-market pricing as equipment has improved, said Pete Store’s Craig Kendall, dovetailing with the better reliability reputations in newer SCR-equipped trucks.
“We take less of a valuation hit on the newer trucks” today versus early emissions-system generations, he said, given increased reliability. Following the dramatic decline in the production of glider kits, starting in 2020, “for a while we saw some pretty big auction numbers for used glider kits,” said Kendall. They were “really ringing the bell, selling much higher than I’d expect.”
As most Overdrive readers know, long before 2020, gliders were hugely popular as an option to avoid emissions-system headaches altogether with remanned pre-emissions engines. Owner-operator Bradley Cole and his Smethport, Pennsylvania-based AG JEC LLC hauls asphalt oil around Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. He recalls year 2017, when he was close to buying a 2015 Freightliner Coronado with an SCR-equipped engine.
He attended the Mid-America Trucking Show that year and, after looking into trucks there with emissions equipment, backed away from the idea. His reasoning? It had all to do with maintenance unknowns. “As a single-truck operation, we don’t just have trucks sitting around where we can just jump in another one and go,” he said. Uncertainty around repairs and associated downtime led him to a used purchase of his current 2015 Coronado glider, powered by a pre-emissions Detroit Series 60. The rig had 92,000 miles on it at the time, today with 558,000 miles on the clock. He’s seen zero notable maintenance issues with it.
“I’m very fussy about my maintenance,” he said. “I do it all myself.”
Looking ahead in his business, with more emissions equipment looming in upcoming model years, “I’m going to hold onto her as long as I can,” he said of his current truck, even “if I have to keep rebuilding her, too.” To Cole, based on what he’s seen some friends and colleagues go through with extended downtime and large shop bills due to a variety of emission-system failures, “I don’t feel it’s worth it, but that’s my opinion as a small guy.”
Bradley Cole’s 2015 Freightliner Coronado glider and 2022 Etnyre asphalt tanker
New and used glider options certainly aren’t exactly plentiful today, Pete Store’s Craig Kendall said, and part of the reason for those big auction numbers in the early pandemic period had to do with skyrocketing demand, just as supplies started dwindling for pre-emissions powertrains. As the used market has “come back down to earth” the last couple years amid aftertreatment improvements, Kendall added, determinations about value and pricing have in some ways returned to the tried-and-true formula. For highway tractors, “generally, it follows age and miles,” Kendall said, combined with supply and demand factors.
Overdrive partners at sister company Price Digests combed back through more than a decade and a half of used-market valuation data for Class 8 sleeper tractors, stretching all the way back to calendar year 2008, the earliest year for which they have adequate historical data. Using the emissions-spec ranges from Overdrive‘s survey, analysts determined average values in each group as the trucks aged. Results in some ways illustrate pricing dynamics Kendall has seen over that time period on the ground.
Readers will clearly see pandemic-era growth in value for each group preceding the 2020-’24 trucks, including even for the groups deemed most problematic with respect to emissions systems, the two groups in the 2008-’14 model year range.
Yet there’s another way to look at value over time. The following chart shows each group’s retained value in the used market as a percentage of its original value. While market conditions play a big part in real value over time, as evidenced by those pandemic-era spikes, long-term results show most models settling to between 25% and 40% of their original value. Recent performance, though, suggests better long-term value retention for 2008-’10 non-SCR units over their 2011-’14 SCR-equipped counterparts.
Clearly, basic supply and demand is a huge part of pricing for used equipment. Yet over time, as maintenance practices continue to be standardized around SCR-equipped trucks, post-2010 truck owners of a mind to maximize resale value could take a lesson from the poor value performance of early SCR trucks. Develop an effective maintenance program for the emissions system, document it clearly, and perform it routinely.
When a potential buyer comes your way, maybe the peace of mind delivered by your maintenance due diligence fetches more for the truck than you expect.
–Matt Cole contributed reporting.
Find reliability ratings and pricing impacts for various generations of diesels over the decades, and more perspective, in the survey report, EPA’s Diesel Emissions Regulations: Pricing and reliability impacts over two decades.
[Related: Live Q&A: Dealing with your diesel’s aftertreatment demons — PM, repair, other questions answered]