October is nearly here and I’m mighty glad. Normally it’s a nothing-much kind of month, the sole excitement being my failure to remember the infinitely better half’s birthday. Now that I’ve mentioned it publicly, I’m unlikely to repeat this annual gaffe. Well, maybe.

But this particular October is different. We’re about to see the concluding moment of a debacle that hasn’t been matched in a long while. And despite my opening levity, it ain’t funny.

I’m talking about the onset of the so-called ’02 diesel engine. There’s an enormous amount of myth and paranoia surrounding these new motors, some of it being spread by folks with axes to grind, but the fact of the matter is that these engines are going to cost you money you can’t afford. Whether you ordered trucks before the production gaps filled in or not, at some point you’re going to be out of pocket to the tune of $4,000 to $5,000 for each engine you buy. Those are actual invoice prices, by the way.

That’s bad enough. But the real disaster, if you take a broad view, is the utterly complete disconnect between industry and government that all this engine mess represents. And maybe you should add science to the mix. I can’t remember an issue that demonstrates so clearly how little regard government has for this business. How little understanding of our needs and our place in society. How cynical their view of us seems to be. I’ll come back to this in a minute, but first the engines themselves.

I’ve written it before, and yes, I’m out on a limb, but I do not believe that ’02 EGR engines will cost you a gazillion extra bucks in either maintenance or fuel economy. While some engine makers have done a lot more testing than others, and while engineers have definitely been scrambling, there’s no evidence to suggest that these engines will suffer in terms of reliability or durability. Oil-change intervals won’t change at all in most cases.

I’m working on more than gut instinct. I had a chat with Bill Januszewski the other day, and it was instructive. He’s no small fish — director, equipment and purchasing, at Trimac Transportation System — and I wanted to talk with him because he’s been testing the Cummins ISX in EGR trim for two years now in revenue service. He’s had two, both in the same Freightliner Century Class tractor. One was an early example that did about 175,000 kilometres, the second a near-production model that’s done some 80,000 km so far. This truck is one of seven ISX-equipped Century Class models hauling heavy weights out of Langley, B.C.

Guess what? It’s a limited sample, but over those 255,000 km, the EGR engine has recorded a fuel-economy improvement of 0.1 mpg compared to the average of the non-EGR ISX engines.

“It was a surprise,” Bill admits. “We wanted to have some first-hand data, but we went in thinking we’d lose 0.3 or 0.4 mpg.”

In most cases, drivers will either see no difference at all in the new engines, as has been the case at Trimac, or they’ll be pleased by the nature of EGR engines. My own experience — with a Cummins ISB and an ISX, both near-production examples — left me smiling. Januszewski, incidentally, did no pre-buying, and he agrees that ’02 engines are objects of mistaken worry. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” he says. “My only concern is if they’d stuck to the original January 2004 EPA deadline, we would have had the chance to do more testing of sensors and things.”

Which leads me back to the gap between government and industry that concerns me so much. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Justice Department took an adversarial approach to engine makers while ignoring trucking practitioners altogether when they forced its 2004 emissions standards on the industry more than one year early. The EPA blithely assumed that engineering triumphs would occur, that answers could be achieved in time.

Our environment must be protected, but the cost to a small number of North American businesses, including your own, has been ignored. Engine makers are spending billions they will never recover. Even with higher prices, you folks couldn’t possibly pay the actual incremental cost of the new engines. Caterpillar and Cummins and Detroit and the others will absorb these costs for the public good.

Would it not have made more sense for the EPA to work with the U.S. Dept. of Energy on a strategy that would see maximized fuel efficiency and minimized emissions enshrined as twin, linked priorities? A better effort to limit idling, for instance, could conceivably whack 10 per cent or more off the trucking industry’s fuel bill — and off the load placed on our environment.

Surely we deserve a more pragmatic approach from government, one that’s inclusive, involving industry and the scientific community as partners. I want governments, working with the sources of new technology, to fund testing by end users like you on a big scale. As an alternative to the bulldozer approach of the EPA, it might get us somewhere. And we’d be contributors toward sound policies, instead of victims of misguided ones.