A sense of déjà vu combined with the merest tingling of schadenfreude greets the non-US visitor to the Mid America Truck Show. For it is 2008, meaning that there are less than two years to go before the Americans embrace EPA 10, and EPA 10 means a choice between SCR and EGR. For those of us who are well nigh incandescent with ambivalence towards the whole debate, there is something rather refreshing about sitting through US press conferences in which one or the other method of compliance is discussed.
Not because they are any more enlightening than the whole heap of spiel that still masquerades as honest debate in the UK certainly not - in fact our delight is that borne of the smart-arsed, and the knowledge that we know more-or-less exactly what is going to be said next. Infrastructure is a problem - yes it is, no it isn't. Availability of AdBlue - or DEF as it's known in the Land of the Free - problem yes, problem no. Fuel consumption - good, bad. And so it meanders onwards until one entirely disingenuous skewing of statistics gives way to another.
By the end of the day, my American colleagues are muttering darkly about the absence of straight answers to simple questions, and our hero is indulging in a little bit of innocent sh*t stirring with the more animated members of the colonial truck press. Why hasn't MAN launched its Euro-5 EGR engine yet, I ask one - who immediately repeats the question to International's Dee Kapur, who is relying on the same beast for EPA 10 - rather close to Euro-6 - compliance.
What happens when the hire fleets start seeing DEF tanks coming back filled with something other than DEF, I ask another - who trots off and repeats the same question to a Paccar techno-type. All good clean innocent fun. It's difficult to see quite how this one will play out, but waffle and verbiage look to be the order of the next few days. And if the US starts to follow Europe in other ways - an American Driver CPC perhaps - the potential for merriment would seem to know no bounds.
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