PEORIA, Ill. — Caterpillar says it is continuing to receive positive feedback from users of its ACERT engine technology.

Chris Cooper of Boyd Brothers Transportation has reported that fuel economy has actually improve when compared to pre-ACERT numbers, Caterpillar says.

"Fuel economy is important to us at Boyd Brothers, we’ve been tracking it pretty closely for the past several years," Cooper told Cat. "Pre-emission engines were running around the high fives to maybe six at best. The ACERT engines are now performing right at six-four to six-six in some applications for us."

Caterpillar also says its ACERT engines are proving to be very reliable, with more than 60,000 ACERT-equipped engines operating in fleets today.

"Our reliability and performance out of these engines through life, from the original Cat to the bridge engine to the ACERT, has been remarkable," said long-time Cat customer Matt Percy, vice-president of A.D. Transport in Canton, MI. "We’ve had extreme luck with the Cat engines. That’s one of the main reasons why we stick with them."

Also, Cat says its engines are cleaner than ever before as evidenced by a recent tear-down conducted by Werner Enterprises.

"We did tear down one engine, intentionally, at 109,548 miles. We had no performance problems and no product problems at the time. Our intent was to take a good look inside the engine just to see how it was doing," said Dwayne Haug, vice-president of maintenance at Werner Enterprises, Omaha, NE. "Everything was normal and very clean as we tore the product downwe were very encouraged by what we saw. We had great faith in the ACERT product going into it, but this helped us along in our evaluation of the product."