Yeah I liked the older pre-emission Hinos with the Toyota J08E motor. We had a couple in a previous fleet I worked for. Clean running, easy starting, never seemed to have much go wrong with them. I don't know that there's all that much to recommend the Hino truck now that it has a Cummins though. The closest Hino dealers for us here in Montana are two states away in either Denver or Spokane so that kind of rules them out in terms of parts/service support. Pretty much forced to stick with what is sold out here, which means Freightliner, International, Ford, or Chevy. Mack or Volvo if I wanted to get adventurous, but I don't find the new Mack MD platform that exciting. Take an OTR semi truck cab that they have been using since the '90s, stick a short hood on it and a Cummins/Allison underneath.... Great effort.
We have 4 electronic DT466's in the current fleet, two EPA98 units (12 valve head, wastegaste turbo, no EGR), and two EPA04 units with VGT, 24 valve heads, EGR. I love the early ones. Similar injection system to a 7.3L PSD, trouble-free, easy starting even with no intake heater or glow plugs. The later EPA04 ones have had EGR cooler failures, VGT failures, and constant injection system issues. FICMs burning up every time someone runs the batteries down, hard starting, injector failures, stiction problems... Sound like a 6.0L PSD? Yeah, because it's all that same stuff. I would like to see those go away. They run nice once when everything is right, though, again like a 6.0L.
The DT motors are one of the only medium range motors with replaceable liners. The other one I like is the Isuzu 6HK1. But like the Hino motor and almost all others, it's been replaced by the Cummins/Allison in current era models. Hard to see that combo as very attractive compared to a 20-year-old pre-emission DT466E, or even an old CAT 3126 or MBE 900. We have a few of those as well. Hence the challenge of replacing any of them.
At least at the pickup truck scale, I can't see how a modern diesel pencils out anymore vs a modern gasser like the 7.3L in terms of reliability and long term ownership cost. My question is whether that may be true up in the Class 6 category too. Might have to try one and find out.