The new common rail diesels

The other contributing factor in longer engine life is better material and surface treatment, better thermal loading, better design and better lubricants.

As you say "CRD are here to stay" and eventually most will have to get a CRD engined vehicle if they want a diesel....... or drive around in a 30+ year old dinosaur.

CRD vehicles are just as reliable as no CRD and in some cases more reliable..... just that some get scared by how they work and the old "but if something happened" syndrome.

CRD has been around since the late 90's.

Most bad comments are made by people who have never had anything to do with them or think and worry about things that will never happen.

People forget how many non CRD vehicles have been stuck on the side of the road going nowhere quickly.

Times are changing and some just need to get use to it.

When you think of it your Ranger puts out nearly double the HP and a lot more torque in a smaller capacity with less cylinders reliably with better economy than a larger engine 20-25 years ago.

BTW Series 60's made use a lot of money in the earlier ones....... with things breaking and falling off through vibration and harmonics.

Rockape
This is a modern day take on a previously used, but un reliable aircraft engine feature. It was the turbo geared directly to the crankshaft in the Wright 3350 Turbo Compound Radial aircraft engine (3400 HP) used on the Lockheed Super Constellation.
They were noted for their unreliability due to the fact they were before their time with regards to the materials and technology of that era.
With the features on this DD15 being now on the cutting edge of modern diesel technology it will in time filter down to ordinary cars, with the expected increase in longevity and reliability, and even one day into smaller aircraft I dare say.
I am old enough to remember when cars which had clocked up 50,000 miles (approx 110,000 KM) were burning oil and needing an overhaul and with modern cars just run in.
The first turbine engines in aircraft had their life measured in hundreds of hours and then 4-5000 was considered exceptional, to now it is 30-40,000 hours plus without being removed from the wing.
All of this is only possible because of computer control of the vital parameters to prevent any out of tolerance of temps and pressures.
I never thought I would see the day when you tell the computer what you would like done and then you will be told what the computer will allow you. (Simply the accelerator of your modern cars; it is a computer input and is not connected to anything else. Even more so the pilot of a modern day airliner where the throttles, brakes and flight controls are via a computer.)
Regarding aircraft, I am happy working on an older one, which at the moment is a mass of cables disconnected due the amount of things removed, or about to be removed, or have been refitted after inspection.

Rockape - I dunno about anyone else, but I'd be disappointed if I bought a new heavy duty diesel truck today and I couldn't get at least 1.6M Kms out the engine before overhaul.

Does DD's "B50 rating" mean that 50% of their engines will blow up before they even get halfway thorough their projected lifespan?? Doesn't sound like anything to brag about, to me.

I've seen numerous KT450 Cummins in KW's with 2.5M kms on the clock and they were still completely original, and they still ran like clockwork! - and the KT450's don't have CR injection, turbo-compounding, complex electronics, and EGR!

It seems that all the DD engine owners I speak to, reckon 800,000kms is the overhaul life of the 60 series - and they're happy with that, because they only cost $30K to rebuild!
Sounds to me, like DD have never aimed for anything else but the cheap end of the truck market.

I'll wager that the current crop of engines that are producing vast amounts of HP from small capacities will never reach the engine lifespan of any of the older, less stressed engines.
Typical of this scenario is the 4.2L TD42 Nissan diesel - they commonly get to 400,000 kms before overhaul - yet the 3.0L ZD30 rarely seems to reach 250,000kms before they're in serious need of overhaul - and you only need an electronic part failure to reduce engine life and performance.
Oxygen sensors getting coated with oil fumes are a classic failure in modern engine design - and God help you, if even the smallest miniscule "foreign body" in the shape of a micron-size piece of dirt, enters a CR injection system - you'l be up for serious $$$'s in overhaul costs, if that happens.

I can recall my brother running his HJ61 on a mixture of engine oil and lighting kero when we ran out of diesel supplies. The old 12HT wasn't bothered in the least by the mixture and ran happily on it for about 2000kms.

Try that with a CR system and you'd find the ECM would shut the whole engine down because set viscosity parameters weren't being met - or the injection system would suffer serious damage, because the fuel didn't meet the manufacturers exceptionally tight specifications.

Caterpillar have two terms to describe engine design - high tolerance design, and low tolerance design.
High tolerance engines have the ability to tolerate wide variations in settings, fuel types, clearances, operating conditions, and general abuse.
Low tolerance engines have NO ability to tolerate even slight variations in settings, fuel types, clearances, operating conditions, and general abuse.

I know what category the modern, high-tech, CR injection, electronic engines fall into!