“If you look at off-highway equipment, there are so many engines, so many duty cycles,” Rhein said. “NOx (nitrogen oxide) and particulates opposes each other. If you have the most efficient engine in the world and it produces no particulates, your NOx skyrockets. They knew at the beginning of the emissions changes how to get NOx down…by producing an inefficient engine.”

Blake says the reality is that the technology is going to have to “morph” into something standard. He said he expects the industry to go through “a bumpy period where no one really knows what the right answer is,” and Tier 4 will “kind of marry” EGR and SCR together. “The billions of dollars in research have to be recovered somehow,” Blake said.

Each manufacturer will be looking at which is the most inexpensive technology and what produces the best fuel economy, Rhein said. “Based on this, they will come up with their final resolutions. Cooled EGR is a very inefficient engine. SCR has brought it back to be more efficient.”

Future-planning scenarios

With so much up in the air, it’s hard to determine what will happen in the future. Manfredi came up with these three scenarios and asked the audience to weigh in via another real-time poll as to which statement each person agreed with most :

1. 10 years from now everyone will wonder why we are all concerned.
2. The world will be divided into emission regulations regions.
3. Let the buyer beware – there will be a flow of used machines between emission regulation regions that will require buyers to be extremely knowledgeable.

The audience was pretty much split into thirds, with 33 percent agreeing with choice a, 31 percent agreeing with choice b, and 35 percent agreeing with choice c.

It appears that only time will tell, but with the EPA’s continued regulations, the used construction equipment market faces challenges that will have to figure out how to hurdle – but it’s just par for the course.