The Mack Anthem is different from a Cascadia or a 579 in more than sheet metal. Mack designs the engine, transmission, axles, suspension, and exhaust aftertreatment as one in-house powertrain. The MP8 is not a third-party engine dropped into a Mack frame. Mack built the whole system to work together.
That can be an advantage. Right up until something in the middle of it breaks, at which point the invoice stops being about a part number.
The documented breakdown: $9,136.54, line by line
An Anthem owner filmed his own repair invoice after a turbo and actuator failure with DPF fouling. It is the most useful piece of MP8 evidence in our record, and the reason is that he read out the whole thing instead of just the headline number.
- Labor: $837.50
- Parts, turbo and actuator and DPF hardware: approximately $5,787
- DPF filter cleaning and shipping: $312.50
- Rental car while stranded: $105
- Four nights in a hotel: included in the total
- Total: $9,136.54
Now do the subtraction, because that is where the real story is. The itemized parts, labor, DPF cleaning, and rental come to roughly $7,040. Which leaves about $2,100 for four nights in a hotel. That is not a mechanical repair cost at all. That is the cost of being stuck a long way from home while your truck sits in a bay, and it is nearly two and a half times the labor charge on the same invoice.
The parts figure is approximate because the transcript cuts off mid-number. The total is exact, because he read it straight off the paper.
None of which means the Anthem is an expensive truck. It means a four-day repair on a truck you sleep in generates a second invoice that nobody quotes you beforehand. If you are running without a cushion, the hotel is the line item that actually breaks you.
Injector leak-down: one owner, possibly three times
A separate video documents a crank-no-start diagnosis where an injector leaking down caused loss of prime. The owner's line: this will be the third one, if that is what the issue is. Resigned, and conditional, because he had not confirmed it yet on camera.
Two caveats before you weight that at all. The video is captioned generically as a Mack Volvo no-start and never confirms the truck is an Anthem or the engine is an MP8. Mack and Volvo share a corporate parent and related injector design, so this is plausible for the MP8 family rather than confirmed for it.
So take it as something to ask about, not a known defect. One owner's possible third injector is a question for a seller, not a verdict on an engine.
What Anthems actually sell for
Seven Anthem listings on TruckPaper carried posted asking prices, out of 721 listings on the site. Seven out of 721. That is a sample, not a distribution, and it should be read as a rough shape rather than a price guide.
| Year | Mileage | Asking price |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 125,000 | $129,900 |
| 2024 | 208,898 | $114,900 |
| 2022 | 444,919 | $52,000 |
| 2020 | 410,000 | $59,900 |
| 2020 | 545,795 | $54,900 |
| 2020 | 562,344 | $54,900 |
| 2020 | 517,000 | $54,900 |
Two things stand out immediately. Late-model low-mile units sit in the $115,000 to $130,000 band. The 2020 units in the 400,000-to-560,000-mile range cluster tightly between $54,900 and $59,900. Across those two groups, $55,000 to $75,000 of value disappears over four model years and a few hundred thousand miles.
The third thing is the interesting one. The 2022 with 444,919 miles asks $52,000, less than every 2020 in the sample, including one carrying over 560,000 miles. Two model years newer, 100,000 miles fresher, priced lower. Maybe it has a history. Maybe it is priced to move. Maybe seven rows are simply too few to draw a market line through. Probably some of all three, which is exactly why this table is not something to quote as market value in a negotiation.
Integration cuts both ways
The turbo on that documented job did not fail by itself. It came bundled with the actuator and DPF work, because Mack's aftertreatment sits inside a system Mack designed as one piece. One component went down and took the assembly with it, and the truck sat for four days.
What you should not overstate is sourcing. Mack parts are not locked away. One aftermarket supplier lists an MP8 category with 96 products in stock, so the channel exists. We still could not pull a kit price out of it, because one major rebuild-kit retailer blocked our request entirely, which is why no MP8 overhaul kit figure appears anywhere in our record.
On the transmission side there is one real number worth carrying with you. A 2022 Anthem's EAC automated-manual shift panel software change was quoted at eight to nine hundred dollars. That is a settings and software job, which is a useful reminder that not every driveability complaint on this truck is a hardware bill.
What the record does not have
No mileage-to-overhaul figure for the MP8. Nothing sourced, nothing published, nothing we would put a number on. And do not let anyone hand you a Cummins ISX or X15 rebuild interval and apply it here. Different engine, different family, different design.
No overhaul kit price either, for the reason above. So if you are budgeting a worst case on an Anthem, that $9,136 turbo and DPF job is the only real invoice we can show you, and a full engine event would be a larger number that nobody in our record has documented.
Before you bid on an Anthem
Pull codes for turbo actuator faults and check DPF condition and cleaning history. Ask the seller directly whether the truck has turbo or DPF breakdown history, and ask for the receipts rather than the story.
Ask about no-start and prime-loss events specifically. A truck on its second or third injector is telling you something, and you want to hear it before you own it.
Check the EAC transmission software revision level while you are in there. It is a cheap thing to correct and an annoying thing to discover later.
Then draw a line. Under roughly 450,000 miles with documented aftertreatment service and no turbo or DPF history, an Anthem is a straightforward highway truck. Between 450,000 and 700,000 with unknown turbo and DPF history, inspect hard before committing. Active turbo or DPF failure with no repair receipts is a walk, or a negotiation that starts at the $9,000-plus documented repair cost and still has four nights of hotel sitting on top of it.
See our Anthem MP8 record and the Mack Pinnacle MP8 record for the same engine in Mack's other highway chassis.