A lesson in Sever Service

[AllThumbs]

One of my goodie boxes arrived with gauges in it and I got to talking to the driver. He was driving one of the box vans that are so common to the national package delivery outfits. He told me they used six cylinder Cummins diesels which many consider to be as bullet proof as any engine out there. I was really surprised when he told me they have to change engines every 70,000 miles. He makes 150 stops a day and by Federal Law, cannot leave the engine idling. Because he shuts down every time, the engine never gets to operate any way but cold. In the winter, the gauge never leaves the cold peg. Living in the country, that is never a problem for me, but it never really hit me how hard it is on an engine to be stopping and starting all day cold.

[suburbanK-2500HD]

Maybe they should have added a fuel heater, if they allow that.. ?

[AllThumbs]

Well, you would certainly think they would try something. Iron is expensive and there is surely some maintainence procedure that would get better results than that. They are probably the biggest outfit in the country so this has to be costing an unbelievable amount of money every year.

[Hubert]

Maybe its a write off as a consumable and get some tax credit.

Plus its more important to maintain reliable service and its statistically calculated that 70K miles is the breaking point of some "probability curve" or something like that. And they figure its just safer to replace the engine at that point.

And its not the whole world fleet that has does this probably just really cold climates. Southern climates its not that cold for very long and not that same issue.

[Robyn]

If you did a series of calcs on the number of packages that these outfits deliver every day and what the costs are, I think that you would find that the cost for there high level maintenance program costs only a penny or two per package.
Spread this out over the 70K miles and its not too bad.

The other option is to rebuild the engines and that is terribly time consuming.

We see usually two to three delivery trucks come by our shop per day, either delivering to us or other shops in the immediate vicinity.

The drivers shut that truck off and they have a special ID type card that must be inserted into a card slot for the thing to run.

This definately stops theft of packages or the truck.

In our town the dirvers try and stop in Key locations where they can carry several items on a hand truck and then walk to the various delivery points.

The constant start/stop routine has got to be Hell on starters and batteries too.


Really too bad that they dont devise an interlock system that allows the rig to stay running but prevents the tranny and such for working or the brakes from being released.

Simply lock the slider door and go deliver the goods.

But, I am sure they have their reasons for what they do.

The cost though spread out over the amount of stuff they deliver is likely a drop in the bucket.

Just look and see what the average cost is for package deliveries.

Long distance stuff goes from the pickup point via the little cracker box trucks to a central warehouse, then onto a plane or a semi depending and to another central warehouse on the receiving end and the process repeats.

I would bet that the 70K mile number on the little delivery rigs does span a couple years or so.


Missy

[trbankii]

I'm surprised that particularly in urban areas they aren't going to electric or hybrid delivery vehicles for this reason. The UPS truck generally stops at least four or five times in the three blocks I can see along my street. As you say, that's got to be hell on the battery and starter and not good for the diesel, but would be perfect for an electric.