Total Cost of Ownership: Improving TCO with Jacobs Technology

To savvy fleet owners, the Total Cost of Ownership, or TCO, is one of those phrases that is ubiquitous in the Commercial Vehicle industry nowadays. It is simply a way to depict the true cost of owning a commercial vehicle. The lower the TCO, often expressed in euro or dollars per km or miles, the more attractive the vehicle is to the potential owner/operator. 

TCO is comprised of many variables, but the ones that contribute the most are fuel expenses (25-30%), driver costs (35-40%), equipment (10-15%, including depreciation or resell value), and repairs and maintenance (10%).  Insurance, tolls, and more make up the remaining costs.  All global Commercial Vehicle OEMs are, therefore, paying close attention to TCO and these top variables. For example, reducing fuel consumption not only helps to meet future emission regulations but will also have a very high impact on the overall TCO. And, designing the vehicle and engine in such a way that maintenance is kept to a minimum helps significantly as each time a truck needs to be in the workshop to be serviced, it cannot make money for its owner.

In short, TCO seems to be just a Marketing term, but it is a very serious topic and Jacobs works hard to improve the Total Cost of Ownership for our customers across the globe.

Optimizing TCO with Emissions Solutions

While Vehicle OEMs are working to improve TCO, so too is their supplier base. Jacobs, being one of these suppliers for valvetrain technology, is key to TCO optimization. When it comes to fuel consumption reduction, Jacobs provides innovative technology right in the heart of the engine. One example is Jacobs® Cylinder Deactivation® technology which reduces the amount of injected fuel by switching off the cylinders that are not needed to keep the engine working.

But Jacobs does not stop there in helping our customers optimizing TCO. At Jacobs we are taking the overall system perspective into account every time we design and develop our products for our customers.

By making sure that our products work smoothly with the rest of the engine, or in fact, the rest of the vehicle, TCO is also positively impacted. An example is our Emission Solution portfolio that, when designed smartly in conjunction with the Aftertreatment Systems (ATS), can drive less complex overall systems with lower overall variables such as weight, number of components and eventually cost. This too will help lower the TCO.

Optimizing TCO

Improving Vehicle Uptime

Jacobs®Fulcrum Technology, which allows for the introduction of Hydraulic Valve Adjusters (HLAs) in combination with an engine brake, is an example of optimizing vehicle uptime, or reducing maintenance required on a Heavy Duty engine. If you don’t need to set lash on the valves anymore, there’s no need to even open up the valve cover! That saves a great deal of service time and also prevents human error and exposure to dirt in some of the more extreme applications.

And then, of course, our products we are best known for: the Jake Brake®! The very fact that an engine brake is helping the overall safety of the truck, helps to decrease accidents and repairs. And, every time you use the engine brake, you don’t need to apply the foundation brakes, which will always result in lower maintenance costs. In the broad range of engine brake technology, Jacobs can supply brake performance that is always optimized for the engine or the application. For the latter case, Jacobs® High Power Density engine brake, or HPD®, puts out equivalent braking power as a driveline retarder, hence making an optimized and simplified powertrain possible. Again, the overall system perspective!

”I use the Jake Brake like crazy and because of that, I easily double the life of my foundation brakes.” – Grant E. Sheldon, Kentucky-based Owner-operator with 50 years of trucking experience.

Improving Vehicle Uptime