EXCLUSIVE: One on One with Navistar’s Jack Allen

Navistar president Jack Allen at last year’s Mid-America Trucking Show.

TORONTO — This week will see a major moment in the ‘new’ Navistar’s history: the first International ProStar+ tractors with Cummins ISX15 power will come off the assembly line. That is, of course, red engines with selective catalytic reduction (SCR) aftertreatment, not MaxxForce 15s with exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) alone. The Cummins re-entry into International trucks follows Navistar’s decision this past summer to give up on its troublesome EGR-only technology path.

“The plan that we’ve laid out over the last few months has come to fruition,” said Jack Allen, Navistar’s president, North American Trucks and Parts, in an exclusive interview with Today’s Trucking. Joining him for a sit-down chat with us last week was Mark Belisle, president of Navistar Canada.

“The first 15 ProStars with the ISX engine will come down the line next week, which is what we committed to back in July,” said Allen, who first joined the company in 1981 as a design engineer. “It’s very important for us. We haven’t been great at this, so it’s very important to us as we hit this re-set button that we achieve milestones and hit those commitments.”

“On the product side, the first thing we had to do when we made the decision last summer to switch technologies was to make peace with the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency],” Allen continued. “We had to get our current 13-liter engines and the credit situation and all that ironed out. So we worked through that and we got that done. That was the first thing we had to do.

“The second thing we had to do was an agreement with Cummins and we signed on July 29th a memo of understanding with them. We said we’d have the definitive agreement done by Nov 1 and we finished that on Oct 27.

“The next thing was production of the ProStar with the ISX, 15 of them, with another 285 of them coming in the last three weeks of December. Those 15 will be sellable units but we’ll see what we learn at the plant and take a couple of weeks to get things ironed out before we send more down the line. Come January it will be full, open production of the ProStar with the ISX engine. That’s our high-runner product. So the next step is the 9900 and the 5900 [with the ISX15]. The 9900 will get the ISX15 in April, the 5900 in June.”

“That’s a critical piece for the Canadian market,” added Mark Belisle. “The on/off-highway market, the logging market, that’s a business we haven’t really been in for the last couple of years. This is really critical to western Canada and Quebec.”

All of that is well on track, we were told, which will complete the 15-liter lineup.

“We signed a long-term strategic agreement with Cummins and they’re going to be our 15L partner for as far as we can see right now,” Allen said. “It was two phone calls and two dinners and we had the deal done. True story. We had our memorandum of understanding complete.”

The two companies are hardly strangers, having done business together for 75 years.

“The reality,” added Allen, “is that even while we didn’t do business with them for the U.S. and Canada over the last few years, in 2011 we bought 11,000 Cummins ISX and ISM engines that we sold in Mexico and Latin America. So we had Cummins ISX engines in ProStars in 2011. They just happened not to be sold here but in Mexico.”

And what about the 13-liter MaxxForce 13?

“We have the ability to sell the current version, the EGR-only version, in the marketplace right now,” Allen explained. “Then we will add SCR to that unit. We selected the Cummins SCR aftertreatment system to put behind our engine.

“It’s a proven system in the marketplace. We can go to customers and they understand that they’re not testing a new technology with us. We’re leveraging an existing proven technology… Again, we’ll begin production in the March/April time period for the 13-liter with SCR in the ProStar. And then throughout the summer we’ll introduce the 13-liter into the other models.

“So by summer of next year we will have done a complete transformation of our product line for the U.S. and Canada,” Allen said.

“The adaptation of SCR to International vehicles is not a huge leap in technology or engineering knowledge. It’s been done in the industry, it’s been done around the world, and we’ve done it. For example, all of Ford’s medium-duty vehicles in the U.S. and Canada have been all SCR since 2010. We did the engineering, we did the purchasing of those components, and we’re doing the manufacturing of them every day in the same plant the ProStar’s going to be in. So we believe this will be a flawless transition. We’ve got a lot of experience.”

Asked how International dealers have weathered the difficulties of the recent past and how they’ll move forward, both Allan and Belisle stressed that the company and its dealers are partners with a common purpose.

“The best thing we can do with the dealers right now is focus on the future and focus on them being our partners in the launch of these products” Allen said. “So we have a product advisory board process with the dealers and they fully support out new product strategy, I would say, without hesitation.”

“The importance of the parts and service component of the business has been immense for Canadian dealers,” said Belisle. “That business has been strong.

“They continue to invest. We’ve got Don MacAdam in Edmonton putting up a new facility on the south side of the city. Kevin Tallman of Tallman Truck Centers has taken over the Toronto area and is putting up a new facility in Oshawa. Richard Wilson [of Richwil Truck Centre] is building a brand new 20,000-sq-ft facility in Fredericton. So the dealer network continues to expand and through all of this has continued to be profitable.”

Finally, we asked for clarification on the status of the recently retired Jim Hebe, who left his post as North American sales vice president several weeks ago.

“Jim has a continuing role,” Allen said. “He will serve as an advisor to me and an ambassador for Navistar for the foreseeable future.” — R.L.

Note: an earlier version of this story identified Richard Wilson as principal at East Coast International. He is not associated with that dealership. Apologies. — R.L.