2012-2014 Dura-Max Diesels

[Happy Gilmore]

I was talking with the fleet manager of the company where I previously worked last week. On the newest Chevy Duramax's, since July four different trucks have been out of commission and two have had complete engine replacements on warranty. The youngest having only 25,000miles. The others have had the full body removal from the chassis trying to chase down the cause of multiple different failures. This is the first I've heard of it. Chevy has pointed reasons at the multi-state traveling and different types and quality of fuels used in the fleet, injector issues, fuel management computers however, they gave up trying to diagnose and just replaced the engine in a 2014 and a 2012. I just saw a Facebook friend(who's a dog guy I've never met in person) posted he just got his 2013 3500 Dura-max replaced by Chevy with a new truck after they'd been unable to identify the engine problems repeatedly occurring.

I worked there up to 2010. About 2008 we switched the entire fleet from two year old 2004-6 Ford's with the 6.0L for obvious reasons. The first generation Chevy's had few issues other than Allison transmission CPU's and electrical problems as expected with all Chevy's.(dash lights dimming, head light burn outs, running light problems etc.)

Currently, they bought 4 F-350 gasoline trucks to replace the 4 fleet Chevy's Dura-max's which are down. He said they don't pull his quite as well but, the cost to operate is the same as diesel and the gassers were $8K less per truck.

[dewandgin]

Hmm. I would be interested in knowing what was going on with them and who the engineer was that came out and looked at them. We do a ton of Duramax work around here with alot of the logging companys running them in their fleet and have had alot of sensors go out and egr plug up but no motor replacements except for the one that the guy filled half his tank with gas and ran it until it died.

[Happy Gilmore]

Hmm. I would be interested in knowing what was going on with them and who the engineer was that came out and looked at them. We do a ton of Duramax work around here with alot of the logging companys running them in their fleet and have had alot of sensors go out and egr plug up but no motor replacements except for the one that the guy filled half his tank with gas and ran it until it died.

One was a sensor however, they put it back on the road and it went into limp mode coming home from a job in Montana. It was the one that had the engine replaced on warranty shortly thereafter. They still have a few of the 2010's pushing 200K with no major issues. Crews running them out of DEF has also been questioned by the dealer as a potential cause. I don't know anything about what that does to them but, it seems weird to me considering the prior models have performed well. The trucks are on mining sites, landfills and pulling 14K lb trailers at highway speeds all over the West so, they get abused.

[dewandgin]

Running them out of DEF messes with the computers and then takes a 40mile test drive to reset all the parameters or they will do really wierd things. We have a couple that have more than 600k on them and the guy runs hotshot all over the US and drives the wee out of it.

[Rick]

You're an idiot if you run one out of DEF. You start getting low DEF warnings about 1000 miles before you run out.