Merry Christmas to all...and to all a good fight!

Well another year has come and gone and we find ourselves one week from Christmas? How did this happen?  I still have Halloween decorations on my front porch and Leftover turkey in the fridge...??

Well it happens this way every year. We enjoy the Summer so much. BBQ's and weekends at the lake. Sunburns and cold beers and holiday fireworks. It's seems like it is going to last forever... and then a chilly wind blows through in early October. And then we kick off fall. We have three holidays in seven weeks...all involving eating by the way. Everything is judged by Christmas. "Only "blank" days till Christmas" is the type of phrase coming from a cashier that if I'm in a good mood, I smile and nod my head. If I'm in a bad mood I will attempt to strangle that cashier...Full disclosure, that's why I'm not allowed back into Lowe's. We count how many paychecks till Christmas, and it is never enough. I think Christmas sneaks up on us because we avoid looking it in the eye. We love the idea of Christmas, but the overwhelming task of pulling it off is daunting. Seems silly that we get caught up in the lights, and size of the tree,  and the cards and phone calls, endless parties and the perfect picture to post on Facebook. How can anyone be happy amid all that?

Christmas should be about love. Love for each other, love for the children. Love for strangers and friends alike. If we have that, it makes all that other stuff bearable. Merry Christmas to all this year. I look forward to hearing from you in 2020!

Gas vs Diesel, The Better Value

I'm a Diesel guy.

I say that in the interest of full disclosure so that you'll understand, I'm biased and tend to spend the majority of my attention on the articles and facts that agree with how I already feel...kinda like politics. That being said, every so often customers will share articles with me that are generated by unbiased people, and I love it when one nails something solid. So with that in mind, i’ve often received the question “Why Diesel over Gas engines”, and I decided to give a brief explanation of my position.

Why Diesel is more expensive

Years ago when Elvis was a living King and a cell phone was something that Angola prisoners only dreamed of, you typically could buy diesel fuel about .25 to .40 cents cheaper than unleaded (note: I didn't say premium, we didn't use fancy words in the 70's). There was a simple reason for this, it was cheaper to refine. You could use cheaper crude to make it, and the process took less time, so getting it to market was faster and less costly. This resulted in a boom for the diesel manufacturing industry. People were buying GM diesel cars by the thousands, and our industry was loving it. However nothing lasts forever, and eventually the oil companies got wise. They looked up and down the road and saw two thirds of this nation's goods being hauled around in diesel powered vehicles. Trucks, Rail, you name it. An entire nation was running on that sweet low cost diesel. Following the laws of supply and demand, one day the oil industry decided that they could raise the price, and no one could do anything about it. It's also worth noting that the government got in on the act and raised the tax on diesel to twice that of the tax on gas. The government and the oil industry both understood that the cost would eventually be absorbed into the price of the goods being transported by the rail cars and van bodies of America. The consumer ends up paying $00.007 more for a pair of socks, but who's going to complain?

The Power of Diesel

So the government and the refineries made the move to raise the price of diesel fuel. With a higher cost on diesel pumps, average consumers were forced to reconsider the vehicles they used everyday. The advantages of automotive diesels died at the pump. Diesel owners once again became contractors, construction workers, mechanics, and people who needed the power of a diesel engine. The days of Sally Ann dropping off her children at school in a GM 5.7L diesel were a distant memory. Nowadays, most diesel owners have class three trucks, which cost more, and are designed to perform certain tasks that a typical car owner just doesn't need. The average consumer doesn’t need to haul a John Deere 310 Backhoe to a job site on a regular basis. With the raw power of diesels being made a higher priced commodity, gas engines became the new normal for the average vehicle owner. Diesel stopped being the standard, and was in some ways put on a pedestal. 

Understanding what Diesel COULD be

If you are one of the fortunate few to have an automotive diesel, on average you are getting more miles per dollar than a lot of vehicles on the road today, and yet despite the better financial value, the automotive diesel, while not completely dead in America, is nowhere near as popular as it is in other countries. In 2008 I was in Australia for the Australian Diesel Specialists convention, and at least sixty percent of the vehicles that I saw on the road were diesel. Most of them Toyota’s. It’s not that our friends across the pond have a lifestyle that demands the power of a diesel, it’s that their fuel is not as expensive. It pains me to know that our country could have that vehicle as a popular form of transportation, but because diesel engines have such a bad rap, the majority of our country doesn't want an automotive class diesel. There is a misconception about diesel engines, that they are a display of opulence, and one that is bad for the environment at that. The reality though, might surprise you.

Diesels: Better for the environment?

If we took a step back and looked at our long term environmental goals, diesels are the better value. We no longer have the black soot and loud engines of the 70's and 80's. The diesel engines of today are some of the most efficient and best values on the road, not to mention the amount of power that they offer, the real problem is that not too many consumers know it. The reality is that when Rudolph Diesel invented the Diesel engine, he was interested in making it run on coal dust or vegetable oil as fuel, and in fact, his engine ran on peanut oil. The diesel engine has the benefit of running more fuel-efficiently than gasoline engines due to much higher compression ratios and longer duration of combustion, which means the temperature rises more slowly, allowing more heat to be converted to mechanical work. The real value in a diesel engine comes from the efficiency with which it burns its fuel. So maybe in a few years we can change consumer attitudes and get Sally Ann to drop off her great-grand kids at school in a nice diesel powered Toyota Land Cruiser.

One can certainly hope.

So in summary

Not only are diesels more powerful, they are also more sensible in the long term. Their efficient fuel combustion is better for your wallet and the environment, despite what people may think. The reason that diesels are more expensive at the pump is that 35 years ago they were the popular choice of the American vehicle owner. Following the popularity of the diesel engine, the price of diesel fuel went up, and their popularity tapered off (in America). However, diesels have a great deal of popularity around the world, and the community around them continues to develop. I am proud to be a part of that community, and hope it continues to grow.

Thank you for your time

-Billy Williams

Founder of Diesel Care & Performance

The Internet and Death of a Salesman

I love Broadway

I have been to New York several times and always take the time to take in a show or two. Actors that are larger than life perform in some of America’s most time tested stories. One of my fondest memories was seeing Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman". I took my son and we sat on the second row and I was completely blown away by Mr. Hoffman's performance. From the moment Hoffman walked onto the stage and looked out at the audience you could see in his eyes that he was lost in the world. For those unfamiliar with the story, it follows the demise of Willie Lowman’s career as a salesman. Hoffman portrayed the old man who has seemingly been passed by in life. Seeing his performance was an experience I will never forget, possibly because it made me consider the landscape of sales in this day and age.

Life on the Road

In today's world we are seeing a different death for our salesmen of today. For the last hundred or so years businesses have operated under pretty much the same paradigm. Build a quality product, advertise with business cards, newspapers, magazines, and face to face visits, then close the deal. I used this strategy as a road salesman for a number of years and I have to tell you, it was fun. Meeting with clients, traveling across the countryside, eating at buffets and then having drinks at the Holiday Inn Bar. After a while you could look around the bar and spot your fellow traveling salesmen, nursing a drink while they read the evening newspaper, or filling out paperwork, dreading going back to an empty hotel room. Six o'clock coffee so you can see a customer one hundred and fifty miles away by eight, and all those gas station lunches. Scarfing down greasy BBQ while studying a map to plot a course for Boise. Yea, I miss it.

Where We’re Going We Don't Need Roads

Those days may finally be coming to a close. Modern business is changing so rapidly that we cannot wrap our arms around it sometimes. My cell phone has virtually replaced my laptop, which replaced my day planner ten years ago. Nowadays I don’t have to plan a route, I just punch the address into my phone and it gives me directions. I can video chat with a client who is having an issue without leaving the comfort of my home. The other day I was able to diagnose a diesel issue on a 6.0L Ford via Facetime. It boggles the mind. I used to see seven or eight salesmen a month when I started into the business thirty years ago. Now I see maybe one a month. They don't seem to exist anymore and that is sad. An email has replaced a visit, a text replaced the handshake. We don't get flyers in the mail, we get PDF's. It is frustratingly efficient.

The New World and those it’s left Behind

Years ago I had an old fashion salesman working for me. Think "Don Draper" of the diesel business. He came out of retirement to help me expand my business and was a gem to work with, but he never quite got how business had changed. That became profoundly evident when I was checking in the incoming UPS one morning and a large box came from a printing company. I opened it to find letterhead. Beautiful full color letterhead on bonded top quality paper. It cost a fortune. Bob had ordered it to mail out follow up letters to potential clients he visited during his travels. I still have about twenty reams of it. 

Maybe the old days haven't disappeared as much as we think. Maybe we just need to power off our digital world and remember a time when business was done over a parts counter rather than a computer monitor. I think maybe I will fire up the old Royal 10 typewriter, plop in some of that letterhead and write a few customers. Maybe even hand deliver a few just for old time's sake. With any luck I can make Boise by sundown.

Thank you for your time

-Billy Williams

Founder of Diesel Care & Performance