CAT MAKES A TRUCK, EPA DROPS ITS BOMB

November 3, 2010 Vol. 6, No. 22

You’ll expect me to start by talking about the latest pronouncements out of Washington with regard to fuel efficiency. I’ll get to that, but in the meantime there’s a wildly interesting piece of news out of Caterpillar, and I have a picture that you may not have seen yet. Gotta start with this.

Cat is about to launch its own vocational truck, based on the International PayStar 5000i and in fact powered by International engines. This has been in the cards for a couple of years ever since Cat announced it was leaving the business of making truck engines and shortly afterwards said it had struck a partnership deal with Navistar. That alliance — oddly called NC2 — was going to see the two firms jointly develop and sell both trucks and engines for world markets, with branding and distribution changing from one country to the next depending on which company was strongest in a given place. Looks like Australia is the first, but ‘Cat’ trucks will also be introduced here as of March 22 next year at the ConExpo/ConAgg show in Las Vegas.