THE BIGGEST DIESEL BATTLE In American Trucking History - Who ACTUALLY Won?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]In 1987, two American engine companies made the same bet at almost the exact [music] same moment. And one of them was about to lose the empire it had spent 15 years building.

[00:00:11]Detroit Diesel rolled out the Series 60, the first heavy-duty diesel in the world built around a computer.

[00:00:34]And Cummins answered with the N14.

[00:00:49]An engine that took everything they had learned from the legendary Big Cam and dragged it into the electronic age.

[00:00:57]What followed was not a polite competition [music] between two manufacturers. It was a war for the soul of American long-haul trucking.

[00:01:04]And by the time [music] it ended, both engines had killed off the other competition in the segment. But only one of them was still standing in the eyes of the drivers [music] who actually ran them.

[00:01:16]To understand what made this fight matter so much, you have to understand where each company stood when the bell rang. Cummins in 1987 was not just successful, Cummins was the king of American heavy-duty trucking. And it had been wearing that crown long enough to feel comfortable in it. The Big Cam family had carried Cummins from 29% of the heavy-duty market in the mid-70s [music] to over 60% by the early 80s. That is not a market position. That is a stranglehold.

[00:01:48]If you walked into [music] a truck stop in 1985 and counted the trucks pulled in for the night, more than half of them were Cummins powered.

[00:01:56]The red valve cover [music] meant something. Drivers loyal to it would argue for an hour at the counter about why no other engine on the road could touch what was under their hood. And most of the time they had the receipts to back it up. Million-mile engines, fuel economy that kept owner-operators in business when freight rates were thin.

[00:02:16]A reputation built on cast iron and slow-turning crankshafts and the kind of methodical engineering that did not chase headlines.

[00:02:25]Detroit Diesel in 1987 was the opposite story.

[00:02:29]The two-stroke engines that had defined the company for 50 years, the screaming Jimmy's that drivers could identify by ear from a quarter mile away, were dying in the marketplace.

[00:02:50]They were too thirsty for the post-oil crisis world, too smoky for the new EPA standards, and too loud for [music] the noise regulations that were tightening every year.

[00:03:01]Detroit Diesel had collapsed from dominance [music] to roughly 3% of the heavy-duty market by the early '80s.

[00:03:08]General Motors, >> [music] >> which had owned the division since 1938, was so done with the diesel business [music] that it was openly looking for a buyer.

[00:03:17]The engineers inside the company knew that the next product was either going to save them or finish them, and there was not [music] going to be a third option.

[00:03:26]That was the asymmetry at the start of the fight.

[00:03:30]The defending champion against the cornered animal.

[00:03:33]And both of them were about to swing at the same target at the same time because they had both reached the same conclusion about where the future of diesel was heading.

[00:03:44]Mechanical injection had hit a wall.

[00:03:47]The fuel system that had powered every heavy-duty diesel on the road was not capable of meeting the emission standards coming down the line.

[00:03:55]And it could not deliver the kind of fuel economy precision that the trucking business needed to survive [music] in a deregulated freight market with margins squeezed thin.

[00:04:05]The answer was electronics. A computer making fuel injection decisions in microseconds. The same idea arriving at both companies at the same moment, but executed in two completely different ways that would define [music] the rivalry for the next 15 years.

[00:04:21]Detroit moved first and they moved hard.

[00:04:24]The Series 60 that arrived in 1987 was a clean sheet design that threw out almost everything Detroit Diesel had built its identity on.

[00:04:33]Four-stroke instead of two-stroke.

[00:04:36]12.7 L of inline six instead of a screaming V configuration. Overhead camshaft.

[00:04:44]Unit injectors firing [music] at each cylinder and bolted to the side of the engine. The part that nobody else had.

[00:04:58]The Detroit Diesel Electronic Control System, the DDEC. A microprocessor reading sensors throughout the engine and adjusting injection timing and fuel quantity in real time.

[00:05:10]It was the first heavy-duty diesel in production anywhere in the world that put a computer in charge of combustion.

[00:05:17]Detroit was not catching up. Detroit was leaping over everybody.

[00:05:22]Cummins took a different approach and the difference tells you everything about how the two companies thought.

[00:05:28]Where Detroit threw out the past and built from scratch, Cummins took the engine that had made them legendary and figured out how to bring it forward.

[00:05:38]The N14 that arrived in 1987 was, at its core, [music] an evolution of the 855 Big Cam.

[00:05:56]Same 14 L displacement.

[00:05:58]Same 5 and 1/2 inch bore.

[00:06:01]Same 6 inch stroke.

[00:06:03]Same cast iron block that had been pulling loads across America for over a decade.

[00:06:08]The early N14s [music] were still mechanically injected with the pressure time system that Cummins had perfected over years.

[00:06:15]The electronic version, [music] the N14 Select, would not arrive until 1990.

[00:06:20]Cummins was betting that their existing customer base wanted continuity.

[00:06:24]Familiar architecture.

[00:06:26]Proven durability.

[00:06:28]Electronics added [music] to a foundation drivers already trusted, not a complete reinvention of what an engine should be.

[00:06:35]Here is the thing about that decision.

[00:06:37]Both bets were correct. Both bets were also wrong.

[00:06:41]And the next decade would prove it in ways that nobody at either company predicted at the start.

[00:06:46]For drivers and fleet managers walking into a dealer in the late 80s trying to spec a new tractor, the choice between these two engines was more than a purchase. It was a philosophy.

[00:06:58]The Series 60 represented the future, and the future was uncomfortable.

[00:07:03]A computer between your right foot and the fuel pump.

[00:07:07]A diagnostic system that needed proprietary software to read. An engine that could be tuned with a laptop instead of a wrench.

[00:07:15]Owner operators who had built their entire identity around self-reliance, around the ability to fix their own equipment on the side of the road at 3:00 in the morning, looked at the Series 60 and saw a future they did not want any part of.

[00:07:29]Mechanics who had spent 30 years learning the language of mechanical injection [music] looked at the DDEC and saw their professional knowledge being walled off behind a manufacturer controlled diagnostic tool.

[00:07:42]The N14, by contrast, looked familiar.

[00:07:46]The valve cover came off, and what was underneath was an evolution of [music] an engine that drivers had been running since the '70s.

[00:07:53]Even when the Select electronic version arrived, the architecture underneath was still the same Cummins they knew.

[00:07:59]The injectors were still cam actuated.

[00:08:02]The cylinder heads were the same modular design.

[00:08:05]A mechanic who had built his career on the big cam could walk up to a Select N14 and know what he was looking at.

[00:08:12]The electronics were managing the fuel system, but the bones of the engine were continuity, not [music] revolution.

[00:08:19]For an industry full of people who valued the knowledge they had earned over decades, that mattered [music] enormously.

[00:08:26]And then the fuel receipts started coming in, and the philosophical debate started losing ground [music] to the math.

[00:08:32]The Series 60 was delivering fuel economy that drivers had not seen since their trucks were new from the factory.

[00:08:38]Not slightly better, meaningfully better.

[00:08:42]Owner-operators running the Interstate corridors, the kind of routes where fuel economy differences [music] are easy to measure because the loads and speeds are consistent, were reporting numbers that made the spec sheet difference between the two engines feel academic.

[00:08:57]A driver who could pick up an extra half mile per gallon over the course of a year was looking at thousands of dollars in his pocket that had not been there before.

[00:09:06]For a man making payments on his rig, that was not a feature.

[00:09:10]That was the difference between staying in business and parking the truck.

[00:09:15]The reason the Series 60 was winning the fuel economy [music] fight came down to the precision of the DDEC system.

[00:09:23]Mechanical injection, even the best mechanical injection that Cummins or anyone else was building, had a fundamental limitation. The timing was set, and once it was set, it stayed set until something physically changed it.

[00:09:38]As an engine wore through its service life, the timing drifted. Not dramatically.

[00:09:44]Not visibly.

[00:09:45]But fractionally, mile after mile, in ways that compounded into measurable fuel waste over hundreds of thousands of miles.

[00:09:53]The DDEC compensated for that drift in real time.

[00:09:57]Every injection event was being managed by a computer [music] reading sensor data and making adjustments measured in microseconds.

[00:10:05]A Series 60 at 400,000 miles was still injecting fuel within the same tight tolerances as the day it left the factory. The N14, mechanical or electronic, could not match that precision because its fuel system architecture had limits that predated the electronics.

[00:10:25]Cummins knew it.

[00:10:26]The engineers in Columbus, Indiana, were not blind to what the DDEC was doing.

[00:10:32]When the N14 Select launched in 1990, Cummins finally had electronic injection control and the gap started closing.

[00:10:41]By the time the Select Plus arrived in 1997, the gap was nearly gone.

[00:10:47]525 horsepower [music] in its hottest configuration. 1,850 pound feet of torque available right off idle at 1,200 RPM. Million-mile durability that had defined Cummins for a generation. Now married to the kind of electronic [music] precision that could compete on the fuel economy spreadsheet.

[00:11:09]But here is what nobody at Cummins fully appreciated until it was too late.

[00:11:14]The fight had already been decided in the years between 1987 and 1990, when the Series 60 had no electronic competition.

[00:11:23]In those critical years, Detroit had been building dealer relationships, [music] fleet contracts, and most importantly, driver experience that compounded into market momentum.

[00:11:34]Freightliner [music] signed an exclusive deal to put Series 60 engines in their trucks.

[00:11:40]Penske Truck Leasing, which Roger Penske was building into one of the largest fleets in North America, was running Series 60 power.

[00:11:49]Every trucking school graduate who learned on a Series 60 was a future customer who knew that engine before they ever sat behind the wheel of an N14.

[00:11:59]Every fleet manager who had 3 years of fuel economy data showing what the DDEC could do was looking at his next purchase order with that data in mind.

[00:12:10]Detroit Diesel, which had been at 3% market share in the early '80s, climbed to 33% by 1993.

[00:12:18]By the mid-'90s, the Series 60 was the dominant choice in over-the-road long-haul trucking. [music] The market share reversal was complete.

[00:12:27]The hated engine, as drivers had called it when it first arrived, had become the engine fleets refused to spec without.

[00:12:34]And the engine that had taken it down to that 3% [music] low point was no longer the issue.

[00:12:40]The engine that was getting taken down now was the one with the red valve cover.

[00:12:45]The N14 Select Plus did not lose because it was inferior. Anyone who ran one will tell you that.

[00:12:52]The N14 Select Plus was, by almost every measure that mattered to a long-haul driver, the best engine Cummins ever built.

[00:13:01]The torque delivery was extraordinary.

[00:13:04]The reliability was the kind of reliability that put trucks past a million miles routinely. The mechanics who knew it loved it because it could be diagnosed and serviced in ways that made the work day make sense.

[00:13:18]Drivers who came up through the late '90s on Cummins power had a relationship with that engine that bordered on devotion.

[00:13:24]Ask any veteran trucker today about the N14 [music] Select Plus and you will get a pause before the answer. And the pause is the kind of pause [music] that comes when someone is trying to find words for something they truly cared about.

[00:13:38]What the N14 lost to was not engineering. It was timing.

[00:13:44]Detroit had reached the customers first with the electronic argument. And those customers had built their operations around what the Series 60 had delivered.

[00:13:53]By the time Cummins had a fully competitive electronic platform, the procurement decisions for the bulk of the long-haul fleet had been moving in the other direction for half a decade.

[00:14:03]Market momentum in the heavy-duty truck business is enormous. Once a fleet has standardized on an engine, the training, the parts inventory, the dealer relationships, the maintenance protocols, all of it becomes infrastructure that resists change.

[00:14:21]Detroit had built [music] that infrastructure first.

[00:14:24]And here is where the rivalry between these two engines starts producing the kind of commentary that you can still hear today at any truck stop where two veteran drivers happen to sit at the same counter.

[00:14:38]The Series 60 driver and the N14 driver did not just disagree about which engine was better.

[00:14:45]They disagreed about what an engine was supposed to be.

[00:14:48]The Series 60 driver was someone who had made peace with the computer.

[00:14:53]He had figured out that the DDEC was not taking anything away from him. That the diagnostic information actually made his life easier. That the fuel economy was real money in his pocket every week.

[00:15:07]The N14 driver was someone who valued the lineage.

[00:15:12]The connection to the big cam.

[00:15:14]The simplicity of an engine that had iron at its core and electronics layered on top, not the other way around.

[00:15:20]Both perspectives were honest. Both were earned.

[00:15:24]Neither was going to convince the other.

[00:15:26]There were also genuine technical differences that drove the loyalty on each side.

[00:15:31]The Series 60 had a personality that was frankly more clinical.

[00:15:36]It did its job extremely well, but it did not deliver that job with much drama.

[00:15:41]The throttle response was processed first, then delivered. The power came on smoothly and predictably across the RPM range.

[00:15:50]Drivers who came off mechanical engines sometimes thought something was wrong with the Series 60 because it felt so much less aggressive than what they were used to. It was working harder than it sounded like it was working, and the fuel stops told the truth.

[00:16:04]The N14 had a completely different character.

[00:16:08]The torque key came on heavy and early.

[00:16:11]The engine sounded like it was working, and it was, but in a way that drivers who had grown up on Cummins power found deeply familiar and reassuring.

[00:16:21]It pulled grades with an attitude that [music] drivers loved. There was a directness to the way it delivered power that the Series 60, for all its precision, simply did not match.

[00:16:32]If you put a driver who had run nothing but N14s for a decade into a Series 60, the most common complaint was not about the fuel economy or the reliability.

[00:16:43]It was that the engine did not feel like it was working with him. It felt like it was working around him.

[00:16:49]On the mountain grades, the [music] contrast played out in ways that drivers still talk about. A Series 60 climbing a long grade was making constant small adjustments. The DDEC was reading boost pressure, exhaust temperature, crankshaft position, and trimming the injection event for the conditions of that exact moment.

[00:17:08]The result was a climb that was more efficient and easier on the engine over time, but it did not feel as muscular as the alternative.

[00:17:16]The N14, especially in select plus form, climbed a grade like it was personally offended by the existence of the hill.

[00:17:24]The torque was there, the pull was there.

[00:17:28]The driver felt the engine doing the work, and there was a satisfaction in that experience that mattered to a lot of people in ways that no [music] spec sheet would ever capture.

[00:17:38]The maintenance debate was its own front in this war, and it was where mechanics weighed in most heavily.

[00:17:45]Series 60 advocates pointed to the diagnostic transparency. The DDEC logged fault codes, performance parameters, [music] every time the engine started, every time it shut down.

[00:17:57]A fleet manager who knew how to use that data could move from scheduled maintenance based on rough mileage estimates to condition-based maintenance driven by what the engine was actually telling him.

[00:18:08]That changed how serious fleet operations approached their maintenance budgets. N14 advocates pointed to something different. The ability of a competent mechanic to actually fix the engine without proprietary tools.

[00:18:21]The injectors could be pulled and tested. The fuel system could be diagnosed with traditional methods.

[00:18:27]For owner-operators who valued independence, and for small fleets that could not afford to send every diagnostic question to a Detroit dealer, the N14 represented a kind of operational freedom that the Series 60 traded away for its electronic advantages.

[00:18:45]And then there were the failure modes, because every engine has failure modes, and the failure modes of these two engines were dramatically different in ways that shaped their reputations.

[00:18:57]The Series 60's most consistent vulnerabilities were electronic.

[00:19:02]ECM failures, sensor problems, injector harness issues that could put a truck on a tow truck because the diagnostic systems flagged a condition that the engine could not run through.

[00:19:15]When a Series 60 failed in this way, the truck stopped. There was no limping home.

[00:19:20]The computer made a decision, and the decision was final until somebody with the right diagnostic equipment and the right replacement parts arrived.

[00:19:29]For a driver with a load and a delivery window, this was a particular kind of nightmare.

[00:19:35]The N14 had its own consistent weakness, and any honest Cummins driver will tell you what it was, the injectors.

[00:19:43]The injector failures and the surrounding electronics that drove them were the Achilles heel of the platform.

[00:19:50]They were not catastrophic in the way a Series 60 ECM failure could be, but they were chronic.

[00:19:57]A Cummins shop that worked on N14s [music] regularly had injector kits in stock as a matter of routine, and most owners who ran one through serious mileage went through at least one injector replacement in the engine service life.

[00:20:10]The fuel solenoid was another known weak point. These were not [music] engines that failed dramatically. They were engines that asked for periodic attention to specific known problem areas.

[00:20:21]By the late '90s, the heavy-duty diesel market had effectively become a two-horse race for the long-haul segment.

[00:20:29]Caterpillar was still in the game with the 3406E and its successor, the C15.

[00:20:36]And Cat had its devoted following, especially in the west and in the owner-operator community, where the willingness to pay extra for tuneability and brand identity ran deep. But the volume contracts, the fleet decisions, the trucks coming off the line at Freightliner and other major manufacturers, those were largely a Detroit and Cummins conversation.

[00:20:58]The other players that had shared the market in the early '80s had been pushed to the margins, partly by these two engines and partly by an industry consolidation that was reducing the number of viable platforms across the board.

[00:21:12]And then the regulatory landscape shifted in a way that would eventually take both engines down.

[00:21:18]And the way each company responded to that shift tells you something important about how this rivalry [music] actually ended.

[00:21:26]The EPA standards, arriving in 2002, >> [music] >> and again in 2007, and again in 2010, required emissions reductions that could not be achieved with the existing engine architectures.

[00:21:41]Exhaust gas recirculation, diesel particulate filters, selective catalytic reduction.

[00:21:47]Each new mandate added complexity, added components, added failure modes, and added cost.

[00:21:54]Both the Series 60 and the N14 had been designed in a regulatory environment that was substantially different from what was now arriving, and neither engine could be adapted indefinitely to meet what was coming.

[00:22:07]Cummins made the call first. The N14 reached the end of on-highway production in 2002.

[00:22:14]The replacement, the ISX, was a clean-sheet design built from the ground up to meet the new emission standards.

[00:22:21]Early ISX engines had their share of growing pains. ECM problems, turbo failures, reliability issues that veterans of the N14 era found difficult to accept. [music] The trust that the N14 had built over its production life was not automatically transferred to the ISX, [music] and Cummins spent years rebuilding the kind of operator confidence that the N14 [music] had earned without effort.

[00:22:47]The later ISX versions became genuinely competitive engines, but the conversation at the truck stop counter had changed.

[00:22:56]The reverence [music] reserved for the N14 Select Plus did not extend forward to its replacement.

[00:23:02]Detroit took longer to retire the Series 60 partly because the platform had more headroom for emissions adaptation and partly because [music] the customer base was deeply attached to it.

[00:23:13]Updated versions of the Series 60 soldiered on through 2007, but the addition of EGR systems to meet the tightening standards changed the character of the engine in ways that pre-EGR Series 60 owners noticed immediately.

[00:23:28]The cooling system loads increased. The maintenance cycle expanded.

[00:23:33]The mechanical elegance that had defined the engine in its first generation was layered over with complexity that was there to satisfy emission standards rather than to make the engine perform better.

[00:23:46]The Series 60 ended production in 2011.

[00:23:49]Its replacement, the DD15, was a capable engine.

[00:24:09]But it was a Daimler product wearing a Detroit nameplate, and the independence that had defined Detroit Diesel since the Penske era was effectively gone.

[00:24:19]Both engines were retired by the same regulatory pressure.

[00:24:23]Both replacements carried the brand forward [music] without carrying the reputation forward intact.

[00:24:29]And here is where the story of this rivalry takes its most interesting turn because in the secondary market and in the [music] working memory of the people who ran both engines, the rivalry never actually ended.

[00:24:43]It just moved underground.

[00:24:46]There are still both engines out there.

[00:24:48]Series 60 trucks still hauling freight in older fleets with operators who specifically sought out pre-EGR examples for the simplicity and the proven reliability.

[00:25:00]N14 Select Plus engines still pulling in trucks that have been kept up religiously by owners who refuse to let them go to the salvage yard. Both engines have active rebuilder communities, [music] parts availability that has held up better than anyone predicted, and a kind of cult following that grows rather than shrinks as the years pass and the alternative gets more complicated.

[00:25:23]The premium that a clean pre-emissions example of either engine commands in the used market today tells you everything about how the industry remembers what these two engines represented.

[00:25:35]And the conversations have not changed.

[00:25:37]Walk into any truck stop in America where veteran drivers are taking a meal break, and you can still hear it.

[00:25:44]The Series 60 driver who will tell you that the fuel economy and the reliability and the diagnostic transparency made it the most rational choice anyone could make. And that anyone who chose otherwise when that big one was choosing emotion over numbers.

[00:26:03]The N14 driver who will tell you that the Select Plus was the high watermark of American truck engineering, that nothing before it or after it had the same combination of power, durability, and operator connection, and that the Series 60 was always a fleet engine, never a driver's engine.

[00:26:23]Both of them are right. Neither of them will admit it.

[00:26:28]What the rivalry actually killed was not just each other, and not just the competition that came before them.

[00:26:35]What it killed was an entire era of how heavy-duty diesel engines were chosen and trusted.

[00:26:42]Before the Series 60 and the N14, the choice of an engine was largely about brand loyalty and mechanical reputation.

[00:26:50]After these two engines, the choice was about software platforms [music] and electronic capability and diagnostic infrastructure.

[00:26:58]The Series 60 established that a computer in charge of a diesel engine could deliver superior performance and the market followed that lead permanently.

[00:27:07]The N14 Select Plus proved that mechanical heritage and electronic precision could coexist [music] in a single platform and it set a standard for that combination that subsequent engines have spent years trying to recapture.

[00:27:21]Every heavy-duty diesel in production [music] today is descended from the principles these two engines established. The electronic injection control, the comprehensive diagnostic systems, the integration of engine management with fleet operations data, the precision of fuel delivery measured in microseconds rather than degrees of crankshaft rotation. None of that was standard before the Series 60 and the N14. [music] All of it is standard now and it is standard because these two engines proved it could be done and proved that the market would reward it. And maybe the most telling thing about this rivalry is what happened to the third party who tried to compete with both of them, Caterpillar, which had been a major force in heavy-duty trucking for decades, eventually exited the on-highway truck engine market entirely in 2009.

[00:28:11]Cat made the call that the cost of meeting the emission standards could not be justified by on-highway revenue and they walked away.

[00:28:19]The market that had been a three-way fight between Cat, Cummins, and Detroit had been consolidated by these two engines into a head-to-head competition that left no room for a third major player at the volumes that had once existed.

[00:28:33]The Series 60 and the N14 did not just kill each other in the marketplace. They killed the conditions under which Cat felt it could compete.

[00:28:43]What remains today is something more like nostalgia than active rivalry, [music] but the nostalgia is concrete and specific in ways that you do not see for most retired engines. Owners who specifically [music] seek out pre-EGR Series 60 engines because they remember what those engines could do in their first generation.

[00:29:02]Owners who specifically rebuild N14 Select Plus engines and put them back in trucks because nothing currently in production gives them the same combination of qualities.

[00:29:13]Mechanics who keep their diagnostic and their service knowledge current for both engines because there is enough demand from operators who refuse to give them up that the work is steady and profitable.

[00:29:26]The aftermarket that [music] has grown up around both engines is substantial.

[00:29:30]And it is not shrinking as fast as anyone predicted it would.

[00:29:35]What the rivalry between these two engines really represented, and what is hardest to capture in any specification or market share figure, is the moment when American heavy-duty trucking made a permanent transition from one era to another.

[00:29:50]The era before these engines was an era when a diesel engine was a mechanical conversation between an operator and a machine mediated by skilled hands and accumulated knowledge.

[00:30:03]The era after them was an era when the conversation had a third party in it, the computer. And the rules of how that conversation worked were going to be set by software engineers as much as by the people who designed combustion chambers.

[00:30:18]The Series 60 made that transition first. The N14 Select Plus made it most gracefully. And both of them, in their different ways, defined what came after.

[00:30:29]The drivers who remember running both will tell you that the difference between these two engines was not really about the engines themselves at the end.

[00:30:38]It was about what they represented and what they asked from the people who ran them.

[00:30:44]The Series 60 asked for trust in the system. Trust the computer. Trust the data. Trust that the precision was real, even when it did not feel as muscular as the alternative.

[00:30:55]The N14 asked for connection to a tradition.

[00:30:59]Trust that what worked [music] for a generation of Cummins drivers was going to work for you. Trust the iron underneath the electronics. Both forms of trust were earned. Both engines delivered on the promise they made. And both of them are gone now from production, replaced by engines that [music] have to satisfy regulatory requirements neither original platform was designed to handle.

[00:31:22]If you ran a Series 60, what was the moment when the engine convinced you that the computer was not the enemy? Was it the fuel receipt at the end of a hard week? Or was it the diagnostic data that helped you catch a problem before it stranded you?

[00:31:36]And if you ran an N14, what was the experience that made you understand why so many Cummins drivers consider it the high water mark of American truck engineering?

[00:31:47]Was it the way [music] it pulled a grade? Or was it the way it kept running past a million miles when you stayed honest about its maintenance?

[00:31:55]Whichever one was your engine, that engine was part of the working life you built.

[00:32:00]And the rivalry between these two platforms was not an abstract market competition.

[00:32:05]It was a choice that touched everyone who made a living moving freight in this country during the most consequential transition the heavy-duty diesel business ever went through.

[00:32:16]Tell your story below.

[00:32:18]And if this is the kind of history you come here for, hit subscribe so you do not miss what is coming next.

[00:32:41]>> Mhm.