Gas vs Diesel for Towing a Fifth Wheel!!!

dapperdan wrote:


The reason I say this is IF gasoline engines were superior to diesel why is it ALL the major truck manufactures are and have equipped their trucks with diesel motors for the last 50 years? You can easily get a million miles out of a diesel if maintained properly. Then there's the torque factor.

Dan

It's about fuel costs.
- Your average RV might do 2000 miles per year at 10MPG, so about 200gal or about $500/yr. If you cut fuel costs by 20%, that's a whopping $100/yr on a $10,000 engine upgrade.
- Commercial trucks frequently do 2000 miles per week at 6MPG towing much heavier loads, so about $675/wk. A 10% cost per mile fuel savings will result in around $3500/yr in fuel savings and they can easily justify the additional up front cost of a diesel. Go back 15-20yrs and the fuel savings was closer to 30-40% because it was cheaper per gallon and you got better MPG.

This is born out as you are seeing Natural Gas powered trucks because if you have easy access to it, it's cheap.

The durability of commercial diesel engines is because it's common for a big commercial truck to put in 500k+ miles. If you don't build an engine that can do that, the competition will beat you. By comparison retail vehicles are usually worn out by the time they hit 200-250k miles (30-40yrs ago it was 100-150k miles) so there is no point in building an engine that does a million miles. It just adds cost without any benefit to the buyer.

If there was demand for a "million mile" gas engine, it's not technologically hard to do but they don't do it because there isn't a demand.