How This 30-Year-Old Kenworth Truck Is Still Running With Over 4 Million Miles

The lifetime mileage of a semi truck will vary based on its usage, maintenance, and where it's located, but reports pin the average figure around 750,000 miles. Hitting a million miles is readily achievable with the right truck, but hitting 4 million miles isn't exactly something you see everyday. Finding an owner that has driven the truck for all 4 million of those miles is even more unusual, which is why Overdrive crowned Alan Kitzhaber its 2024 Trucker of the Year. The truck in question is a 1995 Kenworth T600, which Kitzhaber has driven since it was new and has owned since 1998.

Over the course of his three decades of driving the truck, Kitzhaber made plenty of alterations to make it better suited to dealing with Wisconsin winters. Among them is an Arctic Fox fuel heater, plus a separate fuel tank that's dedicated to powering the auxiliary power unit and ProHeat auxiliary heater. The 550 horsepower 3406E engine of the truck is standard, although it has been overhauled by Caterpillar three times over the course of its four million miles of service. Its transmission is not original, with Kitzhaber replacing the standard 13-speed transmission with a different 13-speed unit featuring a double overdrive.

Along the way, Kitzhaber also fitted a number of other upgrades designed to make his life on the road as easy as possible. To keep an eye on pressure levels, he fitted an aftermarket tire pressure monitoring system on all of the truck's tires, and to ensure that deer didn't cause costly damage to the truck, he added a grille guard. The guard quickly proved to be a cost-effective addition, with the trucker telling Overdrive that it had already withstood the impacts of four deer.

Kitzhaber also refitted the cabin to give himself more storage space, including taking out the passenger seat and using the space for a large box and a cooler. Most of his mods were made with comfort, efficiency, and reliability in mind, aside from the train horn, which he fitted because, according to Kitzhaber, "everybody needs one of those."

Modern semi trucks are on average more fuel efficient than their predecessors, but it remains to be seen if they can achieve the same longevity as older trucks. Even if they can hit similar average lifetime mileage as the trucks of yesteryear, very few will ever see odometer readings as high as Kitzhaber's Kenworth, and even fewer will have a single driver responsible for all of those miles.