Maintaining Your Heavy-Duty Truck for Longevity

5 Preventive Maintenance Items You Should Not Ignore

Owning any heavy-duty truck, whether it’s a Peterbilt, Mack, International, or Freightliner, requires regular maintenance to ensure longevity and optimal performance.

In the trucking industry, everyone knows that regular maintenance is essential, yet many fleets, companies, and owner-operators neglect preventive maintenance. This oversight can lead to costly repairs and unexpected downtime.

Why Truckers Ignore Regular Maintenance

Truckers often skip regular service due to time constraints and expenses. In a world driven by deadlines, budgets, and shortages of drivers and vehicles, making time for truck maintenance can be challenging.

This short-sighted approach, often called Reactive maintenance, can lead to significant issues. Preventive maintenance for commercial trucks is essential, not optional.

Reactive maintenance is costly in several ways

• Road side repairs are unsafe and high priced.
• Tow bill are expensive with long wait times
• Downtime while waiting to get the repairs needed.

Preventive maintenance minimizes all of the above, but must start from day 1 of owning a new truck or purchasing a used truck. Keep in mind a solid baseline for a used truck is important. Hopefully when buying your used truck you prepared for this part of the process. A preventive maintenance plan for a used semi will not be effective if the truck you purchased has been abused or neglected.

The Importance of Regular Truck Maintenance For Longer Life

Preventive maintenance for trucks isn’t cheap and unless you have your own service bays, it takes considerable time and coordination to get your truck to and from the shop. Hence, the popular quotes, “It’s cheaper to wait until it breaks.” Or, “If my truck ain’t turning, it ain’t earning.”

While there is truth to those statements, they don’t tell the entire story, in regards to routine upkeep.

Commercial truck maintenance, if done properly, can save you money on expensive repairs, bring a better price when selling your big rig, and increase safety for drivers as well as the public.

Proper heavy-duty truck care will help keep your truck on the road, letting you plan for downtime.  The alternative is unexpected roadside breakdowns, which are ultra-expensive, disrupt loads, and create a domino effect that can impact your entire business and ruin your reputation for being an on-time carrier.

And remember, keeping up with routine maintenance will help avoid expensive towing bills that many times are more costly than the repair itself.

For those who have purchased a used class 8 commercial truck, regular maintenance is crucial for preventing costly repairs.

Cost-Effective Tips to Extend Your Truck’s Lifespan

5 Preventive Maintenance Items on Your Heavy-Duty Truck That You Should Never Ignore

In a perfect world, you would check off every box on your truck’s maintenance schedule when it comes due. Unfortunately, reality gets in the way.

Below are five cost-effective tips to extend your truck’s lifespan.

1. Regular Oil & Lube Changes

Oil lubricates the engine, reducing friction and wear. By far the easiest and most cost-effective way to increase the life of your commercial truck. The removal of dirt and debris from your engine will allow for peak performance and extend the durability of your engine.

The older your truck, the more important regular oil changes become to your truck’s longevity. Regular oil changes also provides an opportunity for you look over the entire truck while service is being completed.

2. Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) Maintenance

Reduce emissions, avoid downtime, costly repairs, and possibly fines. Today, the emission systems are the second most costly item on your truck behind your engine. However, emissions systems are quickly working their way to number one. Yet, they are the most ignored for preventive maintenance. Emissions systems are ignored for the simple reasons:  There ultra expensive to service and truckers think they are an unessential part of their rig.

Most companies that run commercial heavy-duty trucks are in favor of clean air but feel the incredibly pricey SCR systems on their trucks are more about politics than the environment.

So in the great American fashion of protesting government interference, many fleets, companies, and owner-operators refuse to spend the money to maintain them, almost as if they don’t exist.

Disregarding routine maintenance on your heavy-duty SCR system is playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded. Today’s bloated emissions systems are expensive and complicated, but wishing they didn’t exist is not a strategy. To increase your truck’s lifespan and resale value, make the service of your SCR a priority.

3. Tire Maintenance

Proper tire maintenance ensures safety, improves fuel efficiency, and extends tire life. This includes checking tire pressure, alignment, and tread depth. A strong tire program is a must from a financial concern as well as for safety.

Keeping up on tire maintenance is cost-effective, and much of it can be done by drivers at little cost. Owner-operators usually get the most out of their tires because they also pay the bills.

Fleet managers and their drivers don’t have it so easy. While fleet drivers are often tasked with managing tire pressure and tread wear, many don’t view it as a priority.

Conversely, service managers are often questioned from above about their tire budgets.  Yet, they must rely on drivers who have checking tires low on their priority list.

Drivers can beat tread life ratings by 20% with proper care. While others who fail to recognize or report that a truck is out of alignment, tire pressure is low or tires out of balance, may get 30% less than the tire rating.  Multiply those numbers by trucks with 6-10 tires or more, and you can see how quickly you can blow up a tire budget.

Proper tire care includes alignment, wheels balancing, and good shocks.  A well-managed tire program is an excellent place to start if you want to save money on truck maintenance.

4. Fluid Checks and Changes

Fluids such as coolant, transmission fluid, and hydraulic fluids are vital for various systems. Regular checks prevent overheating, transmission issues, and other system failures.Like oil changes, this is a no-brainer. If you want to extend your truck’s lifespan, managing and changing coolant, transmission, and hydraulic fluids takes little time. A consistent schedule can save you tens of thousands of dollars in unexpected and unnecessary repairs, towing bills, and of course, downtime.

5. Detailed Records

Detailed records may seem like an odd thing to add to a list of most important maintenance items but they ensure you have done the proper repairs at the appropriate time. This will give you greater value when selling your used heavy-duty truck. When it’s time to sell your truck, savvy buyers ask to see your records. Not being able to produce service records could lower the value of your truck.

With so much good software available, keeping track of service records today is a snap.

The End Result of a Preventive Maintenance Program

Follow these heavy-duty truck care tips and you can save money now and make more money when you sell.