OK, guys. Newer (less than 10 year old) Dodge pickup. Explain to me how it's perfectly fine for this POS to be rolling down the road rendering everything within half a mile behind it uninhabitable. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation, other than it being driven by a complete douchebag. I'm sure I just missed it.
As others have mentioned, repairs needed. Priced modern diesel repair lately?
Mine done by a Cummins professional (who also flies C-130s in his “spare time”, ha...) after I blew a head gasket, after we discussed other things that “should be done while we’re in there” including studding the head, fixing a screwup by a previous shop regarding the turbo waste gate, and other optional things, was five figures.
When you realize many people (especially out here where I live) operating diesel pickups are blue collar trades people — that’s a significant downward force on fixing a work truck.
Also in my area they’re outside of the emissions district.
There’s a reason politicians don’t mess with the ex-burbs — they want a cheap plumber or bathroom and kitchen remodel. And cheap roofers. We all know this.
I’m not kidding. Out west here in cowtown the vast majority of small business contractors live outside the city where they have room to park things like trailers with continuous gutter machines and another for plumbing and bathroom remodel and another with their seasonal roofing equipment, and yet another for their heavy equipment for dirt work if they do that.
But like 80% of Americans, 80% of them are living contract to contract and have no five figure slush fund for a professional diesel shop. They’ll be out in their garage or barn fixing it themselves when they can.
Even if you mandate it by law, their gear can NEVER smoke, unless the fine is $5000 they simply won’t care. The trailers have to get to the job sites. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Extremely and it’s bad for the environment, but unfortunately, those who do it don’t give a rats tail about the environment anyway.
As mentioned already neither do the city whiners. They want their $99 furnace repairs and cheap trades people. They are living paycheck to paycheck too, and can’t afford what it costs to hire a pro tradesman who lives across the street in a half million dollar mortgage.
And they definitely don’t care about the real polluters in the city that the city exempted from the so-called rules. The scale of pollution caused by densely populated people commuting in traffic in bubble SUVs they’ve never once taken off road, absolutely dwarfs anything even the intentional coal rollers create.
Tens of thousands of city busses running around empty or with three passengers for hours and hours a day. City heavy equipment. Hell, even ambulances sitting everywhere idling on a good day.
The scale of their pollution and their hypocrisy is a thousand fold bigger than coal rollers.
Seen any clamoring for new nuke plants for their pie in the sky electric dreams?
Worrying about coal rollers is like worrying about the kid peeing in the Olympic sized pool while the city is dumping toxic waste by the dump truck load into the other end of the pool.
But it’s NOTICEABLE tiny pollution and not the COMMON approved mass pollution of consumers driving to the mall by the thousands to buy plastic crap they don’t need weekly, you see?
Zero sense of scale amongst the modern eco-warrior virtue signalers. Tell them to drive a stick shift Toyota Corolla to work and keep it twenty years and watch them scream they deserve that bubble SUV. They might navigate a gravel parking lot someday. LOL.
Ever seen them lobby for companies to work from home? Covid proved easily half the vehicles on the roads and half the commercial office buildings were never a true need.
You do have control over it. Get it fixed.
Economics. You’ve never left anything you own broken but operable? Not even a smoky lawnmower to manicure grasses that don’t need to exist around city houses at all? Snowblower? LOL.
Not buying the holier than thou routine. Lawn grass won’t even grow here unless it’s irrigated and water is wasted on it. Kentucky bluegrass isn’t exactly native. Try telling the HOA that rocks look just fine over in cowtown. LOL.
I don’t think most coal rollers are vehicles in need of repair, but it’s a larger percentage than this generally affluent crowd here probably thinks.
The crowd that burns 100 gallons of leaded fuel to go a few hundred miles for lunch.
What did you pay your last plumber per hour? Could you afford to fix a $40,000 truck very often on what you paid them?
Be serious. Think a little. The math just isn’t that hard.
A really good contractor can make six figures. But usually not mid to high six figures. They build what little wealth they have in the business itself. There’s nobody giving them a 401K match. Hell, our tax system penalizes them if they pay themselves a real salary and own the business.
In the really large cities, contractors breaking laws to do work is nearly a guarantee. Ask any NYC contractor if they have a permit vs non-permit price for a job, they won’t even try to hide it.
A diesel truck misbehaving that still runs to do those jobs? The least of their worries. Flog it.
Like leaded exhaust airplanes, the fleet of old diesels is dwindling but every solid pre-DEF non-computerized or simple-computers diesel truck is migrating into the hands of tradespeople. Mine went to work on a ranch.
They can’t afford the silly shiny new ones that burp once and their computer shuts them down until a place with a $20K diagnostic machine can ask the truck what it thinks is wrong with it. Can’t afford the downtime, can’t afford the repair. The pro diesel guy charges more an hour than they make at your house.
Seen the price of beef lately? If my old truck doesn’t go to that ranch, tack on another whatever per pound.
My contractor buddy across the road who has all those trailers and businesses and does reasonably well for himself, finally dropped his diesel dually in favor of a couple of gas powered trucks, one dually one SRW. He couldn’t find a diesel he could afford to acquire AND maintain properly. He could, but he wanted to build himself a big shop building.
One makes his gear last longer and increases jobs he can do, the other is ... a truck. A tool. If it smoked a little he’d eventually fix it himself, but it wouldn’t be out of any particular environmental concern. Not as top priority anyway. He’s doing well enough he at least could afford it. He’s clearly in that top 20% and not living job to job.
He’s also booked solid. One of these days he’s coming over to build us a new kitchen and a couple of bathrooms. I don’t expect to see him over here until this fall when Covid vaccinations are truly a done deal and people aren’t remodeling out of boredom and being stuck at home.
No different in my biz. Lots of lip service to IT “best practices” from the giant companies with specialty staff entire teams who do only one specialty. Nobody our size can afford to do all of it.
Always entertaining when customers want what their 35 person specialty team can accomplish or better yet when government customers want something...
“Is this a mandatory requirement by law?”
“No but we waaaaaaaant it.”
“Sure. We’ll give you a quote to pay for it. We need six more staff and your contract made us $1000 in profit. I’m sure you’ll agree, you can’t afford what you want.”
Of course we can’t be quite that blunt about it, but it’s reality. The more meetings they ask for to whine about it, the less likely we’ll get it done, too. Either we meet with you multiple times a week for “status updates” or we go work on it, your call.
All it takes if you want it, is paying enough to every contractor to drive a shiny new truck to your house. Always choose the bidder who has a brand new truck or fleet of them if you’re truly serious about fixing it.
