MTU vs Cat. Diesel

Sounds like the manufacture of those parts probably corresponded with the massive layoffs that CAT went through when the economy faultered. Common complaint in every industry where they tried to have one person do the work of three.

I knew someone who had Scania's and raved about them. However in the US parts and service are very hard to find for them.

By the way, both Scania and MAN are fully owned by the Volkswagen Group. For the utilization of synergy effects, both engine designs will merge and in near future be identical. This will start with the truck engines, the marine engines will follow. And Volkswagen is still on shopping tour, latest aquisition was Ducati.

But one thing is still valid, the area of main usage is decisive. The best engine in the world is useless, if service stations and spare parts are rare like diamonds in your country. Unless you require a power range, where Caterpillar has no type available, for a pleasure boat stationed and mainly used in the CONUS, I would stick with Caterpillar.

In Europe, John Deere-Marine, Scania-Marine and Steyr-Marine engines are getting more popular, because they are very reliable and great engines, but I dont think, their service net is up to speed (at the moment) in the continental United States.

Hello everyone!

I've been told recently that now Cat's and MTU's are similar to maintain costwise..

Can you confirm?

Marc

Hi,

I would say that depends very much where you are getting your maintenance done.

I would prefer to stick to CATS whenever I can but when sailing myself usually prefer to do the maintenance onboard which keeps labour costs down a lot which helps with the overall bills.

I prefer CATS as well. CATS are cheaper to maintain than MTU's from what I have seen. I have seen a lot of failures on MTU's of accessories.....injectors, freshwater pumps, starters, alternators, etc. CATS have been very good to me overall. I did have a set of C15's that had head gaskets leaking coolant between the head and the block.....they were 2007's and it occurred in 2010 with 600 hours on them. The CAT extended life coolant needs to be monitored and changed before 4 years old.

Thank you for your replies!

Marc

BTW, the C30's are darn near bulletproof. The c32's had some issues with the first 150 sets, but have been near bulletproof ever since. They're good motors. My only gripe and it's not much of a gripe is how they run in closed loop until they reach 150F. They sort of lope around (at idle).