In the US, every, or nearly every, truck, other than a pickup “truck”, is powered by diesel. Usually, there is a notation painted somewhere that says “diesel fuel only” or something similar to warn drivers not to put gasoline in it.
It is possible to buy a diesel powered car in the US, but they are rare. I know that VW offers, or did offer, new passenger sedans with diesel engines.
Are there ANY gasoline powered medium to large trucks? If not, why? Is this just one of those conventions that are followed because it’s always been done that way and that companies that handle large amounts of trucks don’t want to have to deal with two types of fuel and two engine maintenance/repair departments, or is there a technical, economic (beyond industry inertia) or regulatory reason? (E.g. are diesel engines more scalable to larger engines?)
If it is not clear, I am excluding pickup trucks from the definition of “truck” I am using here. Let’s not play word games, okay?
You can get a lot of medium duty Fords in gas too. We have one at work, I can never remember what it is but I think an F550, that is a dually dump truck and runs on gas.
Here are some used larger trucks for sale, it looks like a lot of them are gas, and I think most (or all?) U-Haul trucks are gas and some of them are pretty big.
Diesel engines are generally better in large vehicles. See here.
Depending on what you are doing, diesels are the best choice. If you are carrying heavy loads then you would want a diesel and not a gas powered engine. Diesels are very good at making torque, the very thing you need to get a heavy load moving. This is the reason that most medium to large trucks use diesel engines.
In addition to diesel’s specific advantages in large trucks, the main users of heavy-duty trucks are over-the-road truckers, who put massive amounts of mileage on their trucks. Arguably, diesel has advantages for any vehicle, but for normal passenger car usage the premium for a diesel makes it so the break-even point is too far off for them to really be attractive (with US fuel prices anyways). But semis routinely get used for 100,000+ miles per year, so the break-even point comes really soon. That’s part of why you can still get the cube-van type medium-duty trucks in gasoline versions-- these are more commonly used for local deliveries and other roles that might not rack up much mileage, so for some businesses the cheaper initial purchase price of the gas version is more attractive than the lower overall operating costs of the diesel.
In addition to what others have said diesel engines have to be made completely out of steel due to the higher compression ratios necessary to cause the diesel fuel to detonate without a spark plug which can add to its longevity.
I don’t know about U-haul, but when I rented a truck from Penske about six months ago, the smaller trucks (12 and 16 feet) were gasoline and the larger trucks (22 and 26 feet) were diesel.
All of U-Hauls are gas, even the 26 footer. They promote them as being cleaner and cheaper than diesel, but it’s just a sales pitch and the science doesn’t support them.
I was just double checking their website on that and clicked the wrong thing and was amazed to find this photo which appears to reveal some new U-Haul levitation technology.
This wasn’t always the case. I know they’ve replaced their entire fleet at some point in the past 10 years or so, but I rented some old 70s model 26 ft. Internationals from UHaul back in the 90s and they were all 5-speed diesels.
Now, they all have automatic transmission for sure.
Budget still has diesels…I made a 1500 mile trip in a brand new one a couple of years ago.