Alright im looking at a new cummins but i've been noticing that theres a lot of ppl that are selling or trading there new trucks and getting the old 98.5-2002 5.9 24v and 95-98 12v cummins i love my truck but love the look of the new ones be honest im just now starting to look at the new ones. so im just wondering whats up with this b4 i make a mistake and sell my 12v with 195k for a new one with 40miles

 

They are probably looking for the fuel mileage, reliability and the ease of making power. Don't get me wrong, the new diesels are nice and reliable, but they just don't get the mileage or make easy power like a 12 valve or a VP44 24 valve does. With the new ones you gotta get egr deletes and dpf deletes and it generally just ends up costing more in my opinion. I think the new diesels probably are not going to last as long as a 12 valve with all of the emissions junk they have.

 

Like any other new model vehicle the first couple years have some bugs, i believe this happens in the manufacturers rush to stay ahead of the market. Happens with all the big three and others. An example of this could be that the new ford engine was released as a lower horsepower version then immediatly updated to match the duramaxx for horsepower. Arguably the engine had the ability but would obviously last longer with the lower HP setting. The engineering allowed for the upgrade and for Ford to match the market.

Everyone rushes to buy the new vehicle, the dealers and the manufatures scramble to find the most cost effective fix to problems that pop up (they don't consider it a manufacturing error or an engineering error till a certain % of manufactured vehicles have the same problem, customer stuck with dealer for the time being, who is guess fixing), in the meantime customers get angry and go back to what they new was good or to a diffrent manufacturer.

By year three or four they have them tweaked and the fixes are in, this is also about the same time that aftermarket really catches up (the latter time frame is shrinking considerably).

You can find this in just about every vehicle market place. I once bought a first year release motorcycle from and established manufacturer, it was riddled with computer problems, the engineering of components was sound however. After well over a year they finally sent out a recall to reflash the CPU, made the bike perfect. A year of paying for a bike that spent most of the time at the dealer and burned up a large portion of my warranty never being used was enough to make me never do that again...EVER!

My truck (08 2500 cummins) has so far not been plagued with a bunch of problems, had a couple but they were not what i would consider model deficiencies. Alot of the reported problems with the new dodges had little recognition when i purchased it and since it was technically second year for new set up i was reasonably secure in my purchase. I also knew i would immediatly delete the suspect components.