A lot has been said about the Mahindra trucks having clean diesel engines, but what do we really know about them? Both the TR20 and TR40 are going to be powered by turbocharged modern Common Rail diesel engines Mahindra developed, with the assistance of Bosch and AVL. Mahindra calls it CRDe technology and it uses the same principle as other common rail engines made and used by various auto manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota, GM, Mitsubishi and a lot more. To me, modern Common Rail diesels mean no heating time, less engine noise and lower emissions.

To repeat what we wrote in Mahindra TR20 and TR40 Features, these new-generation clean diesels are capable of emitting as little as 97% less sulfur emissions than their old-school counterparts and give off virtually no sooty particulates. Furthermore, they produce less than 30% of the greenhouse gases produced by gas engines per mile.

More good news for the environmentally concerned consumers, Mahindra is working on these clean burning diesels to be able to comply with the tough T2B5 standards for both particulate and Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) emissions, especially for diesel engines. To control the NOx emissions, they will be using the urea-selective catalytic reduction (UCR) solution, which may require periodic urea refills. The urea refill will most likely coincide with the normal service interval. Mahindra offers a four-year, 60,000 mile bumper-to-bumper warranty on these vehicles and although not yet 100% confirmed, John Perez, CEO of US importer Global Vehicles USA said in an interview by PickupTrucks.com that Mahindra may throw in free maintenance and urea refills during that four-year period. The Mahindra trucks will be serviced where it was purchased, which would be in any of the 400 dealers Global Vehicles is shooting for.

I don’t know about you, but this free maintenance thing, sounds promising. Mahindra could actually use this to their advantage since one of the biggest concerns of customers about them is their reliability. With the clean-burning engine and the possible free maintenance, I think Mahindra vehicles are really shaping up to be quite competitive in the US market. Global Vehicles USA may actually reach their 45,000-unit target for the first year of sales.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 11:02 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.