You’re hauling four trailers making up a 174-foot, 200,000-pound road train. The temperature is 115 degrees. Your 650-horsepower engine is getting about 2 mpg, and you’ve got a long way to go. It’s severe service at its worst, and that’s why the folks at Shell chose the Australian Outback to test Rotella T motor oil.
Actually, Shell wanted to test its oil in exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) engines, but there were none available. “So we chose an environment that’s even harder on oil,” explains Peter Van Benthuysen, field testing coordinator at Shell’s Westhollow Technology Center, Houston. “The high-temperature, high-soot, high-fuel-consumption environment was about as tough as they come.”
Even with EGR, conditions in North America may not be as harsh as in the Outback, but truck operators can rest assured that Rotella T was one of the first oils to earn the new API CI-4 certification for use in EGR engines.
