Starting this month, commercial motor carriers and private fleets will be forced to buy trucks with cleaner-burning diesel engines, now that the Bush administration has turned aside a last-ditch plea from the trucking industry to roll back that deadline.

As part of the settlement in a 1998 court case sparked by allegations of tampering with emissions controls, manufacturers of heavy-duty diesel truck engines agreed to implement strict Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limits on hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions in October 2002, rather than in 2004.

Under the penalty structure established by the Clean Air Act, manufacturers that cannot meet the standards can choose to pay a penalty on a per-engine basis. Those penalties range from a few hundred dollars to more than $12,000, depending on the level of pollutants emitted.

Although the cleaner-burning engines may curb pollution, many trucking industry officials worry that they have not been properly road-tested. In a letter to President Bush in June, 345 motor carrier executives wrote that the so-called "cleaner" diesel engines were "untested [and] unproven, and posed a serious threat to the industry's ability to continue to move America's freight efficiently and to keep the U.S. economy going." The motor carriers also claimed that the new engines had demonstrated a higher breakdown rate, decreased fuel economy, a doubling of normal engine-oil consumption, and unexpected wear and tear on other under-the-hood components.

The truckers further asserted that the new engines were too costly given current economic woes. The American Trucking Associations (ATA) contends that the new engines cost nearly $9,000 more than current models, not an additional $803 as the EPA originally stated in its rulemaking.

Despite this pressure from the trucking industry, the White House stood behind the EPA and its implementation schedule. With their hopes for a delay dashed, both for-hire and private motor carriers accelerated their new truck orders in advance of the October deadline, resulting in a windfall for truck manufacturers. Those manufacturers had already reported a spike in sales this summer as motor carriers sought to buy vehicles with older engines in them. According to industry sources, truck sales totaled more than 14,000 units in July, compared with about 11,000 for the same period last year. Once the surge in sales came to an end last month, however, several truck-engine makers reportedly had plans to begin laying off factory workers.

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