Engine News

[piper1]

Cat will not be providing on highway truck engines that meet 2010 emissions.

They are going to focus on the off highway world instead. The "vocational" truck project between them and International will use a "CAT" branded International diesel.

AND,

Freightliner has announced full availability of Cummins engines in it's 2009 models including Cascadia (first time since 2002?). Going forward to 2010 your engine choices will be a DDxx series engine or Cummins. The press release is a little unclear but it sounds like the Cat C-7 etc will be gone.

I had been hearing rumblings that CAT was having trouble making ACERT work for 2010 and that high warranty cost on the ACERT line of current engines, the inability to get higher (or what they wanted) prices for their engines in trucks and, the better returns and higher volumes from their off road business was leading them to dump the truck engine markets.


Big shake up huh?

Cat has said it will support the product currently in the market place as long as it needs to.

 

[FIS53]

Shame to see Cat out of the truck engine line as they've been a force in it for so long. I know over the last decade their sales have been lower and the cost of developing newer restricted emmission engines has been high. The competition from MB, Cummins and DD has been very strong for years now and they've come to dominate the trucking business. Now will this mean more of an opening for some Japanese mfr like Isuzu to have more engines in the market? guess we'll see what happens.
Rob

 

[MSinger]

Our newest fire engine has a 2007 Cat C-9 and has it's own parking place at the Cat dealer. More government intrusion equals higher costs and lost jobs.

 

[moparnewt]

Well I see that my predictions finally came true.I was the dyno tech and fuel and emissions calibration tech that was working on the project to bring the C7&C9 into the 2010 spec.At every turn Cat would try and force us into believing their laboratory findings to try and get an exemption. I was very vocal about what was going on and how we could get the engines in spec.I was eventually fired four months after my engineer was fired,for he too saw what was going on.The company I worked for was hampered by very poor Detroit management even though they had some of the finest German diesel engineers in the world working for them.The Europeans are way ahead of us in diesel technology.I can't name the company I worked for because I could still be in contempt of my secrecy agreement on new technologies.All this went down in 2006,Cat had time to fix the problem,the company I worked for could have solved the problem,but such is the way in the Detroit auto politic.I've work on all the major diesel engines there and there are some you definitely want to stay away from. It's a shame, because I liked the C7s and C9s. I can help you guys pick a good power train.

 

[juliewray60]

Our first truck we drove
for seven years and put
440,000 miles on it. CAT
powerplant. Few problems
and decent MPG

This past Feb 08 we traded
in for an 08 KW W900 with a
C15 475HP. 9 MPG loaded or
empty. Weve always found the
network of CAT service centers
to be top notch and very professional
and reliable.

Just hoping CAT will rethink getting
out of the OTR engine biz.