It's Official, No More Cat Truck Engines

Cat revealed their strategy in 2003...but most of us including me didn't believe it. Cat is an off-road company whose engines worked well until the EPA emissions regs got really tight. It's not that Cat couldn't design engines to beat the regs without significant reliability and fuel economy risks....they chose not to. That's cool, they make way more money on earth moving equipment in the USA.

 

They didn't plan to do it half-axx. But they did plan to do it in a way that was risky for on-highway because it had to mesh with their greater goal....to improve off-highway engines. It's as simple as that. They gambled that it would work knowing full well that they could exit the on-highway business without significantly affecting their bottom line.

 

I don't blame them for getting out of the truck gig and I like the old cats but the ACERT is a POS yellow or not and they are sick of the warrnty work and it is just a case of them taking notice of the writing on the wall

 

Now if Cummins and Detroit would make a similar announcement the EPA might get the message .

 

I would have thought that Bush would have tried to get EPA'07 pushed out a bit. But he didn't. Therefore, EPA2010 is coming whether we like it or not.

Actually, the new Detroit appears to be a great engine for fuel economy despited having to meet epa07. Cummins has their work cut out for them to beat that engine. But with Cat disappearing from the scene that should give them enough additional business to "keep on trucking".

 

Nobody has a handle on the new motors the guys I work bought new cummins they spend more time in the shop then out our 35% idle time just kills them

 

I think a wait and see policy would be the best here. Its obvious that CAT didn't have a clue how to move to the 2010 emission levels and cummins is the only company that figured out how to make an engine that solves the NOX problem instead of tacking on several hundred pounds of extra emission gizmos that requires urea.

 

Agree with Brickman on that!

Prior to 2000, I was living in Victoria, TX., and reading the Houston Chronicle daily. One of the problems that Houston was constantly fighting was staying within the EPA mandated ozone pollution regs., which were going to be even stricter in the near future, (2010, I think). After much brainstorming, these were some of the options that the Houston city government were looking at:
(1) No commercial diesel truck THRU traffic within daylight hours.
(2) No operation of diesel powered construction equipment during daylight hours.
(3) ALL diesel powered highway and construction equipment operating in Houston be outfitted with some sort of pollution restricting device, i.e. catalytic converters, etc.
As you can imagine, local delivery and construction companies were in an uproar. Having gotten transferred back to Lousy-ana, I quit following that little fiascio, so don't know whatever became of it.
Maybe Cat saw the writing on the wall, and decided it was time to "get out of Dodge, er USA".