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You now must line up engine manufacturing dates with vehicle manufacturing dates with model year changes. The EPA set standards that engine manufacturers have had to meet since 2004. To further muddy the waters, emission years often lag production years. This means you could be sitting here in December 2020 and receiving quotes on 2022 model years (Which would be available in early summer 2021). Truck order backlogs often fill up for months, or even years, at a time. For example, a truck built in March of 2020, could very well be a model year 2021. Most vehicle manufacturers flip their model years over at some point in the first couple months of the new year. Often vehicles made in a current year, are classified as next years models.
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We also need to have a quick conversation about production years, model years, and emission years. In this blog post, we hope to break all of that down for you. Quick research can tell us that this is a C15 engine, but what years of trucks did it go into? Caterpillar has never made this information available to the public, along with more details on what features those prefix’s have. For example, SDP22671 has a prefix of SDP. The engine prefix is the first 3 characters in the engine serial number. They categorize it by engine application (Truck, marine, military, etc.), engine model, and then engine prefix. The issue with Caterpillar is that they do not categorize their repair information this way. This typically means allowing a user to either enter a VIN or select a year, make, and model of the information they are looking for. The goal of Diesel Laptops has been to provide clients an easy and efficient way to lookup engine related repair information. Their manufacturing still exists today, except they are done for various off-highway equipment and machines. Caterpillar manufactured commercial truck diesel engines for many years but exited the business back in 2010.