The 12.9-liter Paccar MX, which powers DAF trucks in Europe, features a compact graphite iron cylinder block and head that integrates as many pipes as possible to minimize the number of engine components and improve reliability.
In a couple of years, the truck manufacturing industry in North America will achieve a significant milestone. For the first time, all Class 8 brands will offer a proprietary engine. Customers of Kenworth and Peterbilt still will be able to spec Cummins and Caterpillar engines. But with the opening of a new $400 million, 420,000-square-foot engine plant in Columbus, Miss., Paccar – the parent company of those two truck makers – will offer a third choice.
What Paccar isn’t doing, however, is rushing into the engine market. The company’s DAF unit, based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has built engines for half a century. After opening its engine plant in 1957, DAF became one of the early commercial vehicle manufacturers to introduce turbochargers for diesels just the next year. And the company beat its competition by years when it introduced charge cooling in 1973 to meet the demand for higher engine output and lower fuel consumption.
In North America, Paccar will offer 12.9-liter and 9.2-liter diesel engines modified from platforms – the MX and PR, respectively – currently built at DAF’s engine facility in Eindhoven, where Paccar also operates a major engine test facility (See “Testing in progress,” page 64.) The Paccar PX-6 and PX-8 medium-duty engines for Kenworth and Peterbilt will continue to be built for Paccar by Cummins.
All eyes on 2010
To date, Paccar hasn’t settled on the exact heavy-duty engine approach it will take in North America in 2010. Paccar isn’t supplying and supporting engines today, so it has a certain degree of freedom to focus on an optimized solution in the coming months, whether it’s based solely on exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) or it employs selective catalytic eduction. “We’re testing [SCR], but we’re also testing every other technology,” says Alan Treasure, Paccar director of marketing.
To meet what’s known as Euro 4 and Euro 5 emissions requirements, Paccar’s European engines use SCR. Injection of a urea solution called AdBlue into a catalytic converter helps break nitrogen oxides (NOx) down into nitrogen and water vapor. The technology for Euro 5, which takes effect in 2009, is the same as Euro 4, although the catalytic converter for Euro 5 has a higher capacity.
Paccar’s Euro 5 engine solution isn’t just theoretical; DAF is installing numerous Euro 5 engines today. Several European governments offer fleet owners incentives for early adoption of Euro 5. For example, in the United Kingdom, Euro 5 trucks acquired ahead of the deadline qualify for an annual tax credit. In Germany, freight haulers have for several years had to pay a toll known as the Maut based on the distance traveled, number of axles and emissions profile of the vehicle. By adopting Euro 5 early, fleet owners earn a 2 eurocent per kilometer discount on the Maut. In addition to the incentives, early adoption is helped by the fact that the upcharge between Euro 4 and 5 for fleet owners already using SCR for Euro 4 is smaller than what U.S. fleet owners saw with the 2002 and 2007 emissions changes.
