Cummins stays the course: company maintains stated emissions paths to carry it through 2007 on-highway; no off-highway EGR for Tier 3 - diesel engines

There is an old saying about how the best laid plans often go astray. But as far as Cummins Inc. is concerned, the best laid plans as to how it will meet emissions targets for its diesel engines are still the best plans.

The Columbus, Ind., diesel engine manufacturer, which as far back as the early 1990s had formulated its strategy as to how it would address the succeeding rounds of tightening emissions regulations, both on- and off-highway, has reaffirmed its commitment to the paths it laid out prior to 2002. The current on highway platform, incorporating cooled exhaust gas recirculation, variable geometry turbocharging and precise electronic control of engine functions, will meet 2007 heavy-duty on-highway emissions standards with engines that will be remarkably similar in many ways to what it's selling now.

"We said we were going to have a platform that we introduced in 2002 with cooled EGR that would be the foundation for 2007 and would carry us through," said Dr. John Wall, vice president and chief technical officer at Cummins. "And it's really true.The message we want to deliver as fleets are uncertain about the technology what are the changes we have coming, is that we have a stable platform. There have been competitors who have been trying to convince everyone that we had to completely redesign our products for 2004 and then again for 2007. Our basic message is we have a stable platform and if you want to know what one of our 2007 engines look like, look at one of our current engines."

Cummins has more than 38,000 EGR. engines operating in heavy-duty trucks at this writing and the company said more than 1.9 billion miles have been logged thus far, counting its own test and prototype engines. As part of its efforts to reassure customers as to its confidence in its technology, the company established the Uptime Guarantee program for its ISX and ISM engines. During the first 12 months of operation, Cummins will reimburse the customer for up to three days' truck rental for any failure on an ISM or ISX engine that can't be repaired within 24 hours. The program was first instituted in August of 2002 and since then has been extended twice.

"To date we've rented 36 trucks and maybe one of those was as a result of a problem with emissions hardware," said Tom Kieffer, executive director--marketing at Cummins. "The rest were non-EGP, subsystem engine issues. By any kind of new product launch, that's a record."

It's fair to say that the products have been well received in the market. Heavy-duty truck engine sales were up significantly for Cummins over the last several months, highlighted by an order from Swift Transportation, one of the leading truckload carriers in North America. Swift selected the Cummins ISX engine as the primary power in a two-year agreement with Volvo Trucks North America Inc. It is expected that more than 2000 ISX engines will be supplied to Swift during each year of the agreement.

"The 2002 standard was a pull-ahead standard of 15 months because of the consent decree we signed with the government," noted Christine Vujovich, Cummins' vice president--marketing and environmental policy. "That standard was really the 2004 standard.

"Going into 2004, we had to recertify again and there were some out in the industry who kept asking, what are you going to do for 2004? What's it going to look like? And we thought, what's the big deal? We had already certified in October of '02 and it's really a carryover product. We've done some new calibrations and a couple of tweaks here and there, but for all intents and purposes, it's the same product. So we got our 2004 certification just as we expected.

"But what it's done is given us an opportunity to really focus ourselves on other things that need to be addressed for 2007--the aftertreatment work and integration with the trucks and the OEMs."

Vujovich noted that it was likely there would still be a pre-buy in 2006 --"there is always a pre-buy before new emissions regulations," she said--but that in this case, it would likely be much more manageable than the frenzy of pre-October 2002. "When we looked at the pre buy for 2002, there were three main reasons why people were scared," she said. "They didn't how the technology, they were worried about the reliability of it and if it cost more. This time around, we're certainly expecting to have a lot less "don't know the technology" and "don't know the reliability" because by then, we will have had more than four years of experience with the same technology. It won't be anything new."