Well, Daimler Truck AG and Cummins Inc., actually. Initially, it’s about medium-duty truck (and bus) diesels, to be introduced in the foreseeable future. Those are the engines that are typically used in short distance trucks for transporting goods in and around urban areas. That’s the road transport segment that will be electrified first, one way or another, on a large scale. In fact, that process has already begun.
Cummins had a joint venture with Case Tractor that started in the late 70s and was quite successful. Those engines went in a lot of applications besides tractors. My point is they have been down the joint venture path for years and have learned from them so I think this should work well for all parties.
Is Cummins’ relationship with Chrysler for putting their diesels in Dodge/Ram trucks a similar joint venture? That seems to have worked out well.
I assume Chrysler simply bought the engines from Cummins. Formerly the 5.9 liter engine, these days the 6.7 liter turbodiesel. The current version is also used by PACCAR and is marketed/rebadged as the PACCAR PX-7 truck engine.
Cummins just sells their engines to Stellantis for the Ram. Obviously Ram and Cummins collaborate on the specs and such, from a marketing POV.
But this Cummins-Daimler “partnership” isn’t quite a classic JV either; Daimler is inviting Cummins to build Cummins’ engines at Daimler’s facilities. Cummins is the one spending the money to develop these Euro VII-compliant diesels.
Cummins has actually been selling diesel engines to Daimler-Benz/Mercedes/etc. for decades, starting with the purchase of Freightliner in 1981 and expanding to Dodge during the Daimler Chrysler years (98-07).
This appears to be Mercedes opting for the buy side of make/buy in the same way that International quit developing their own DT series engines in favor of Cummins for their medium trucks. As an engine specialist Cummins has more resources to devote to meeting ever tighter emissions regs in a possibly doomed segment.
It’s not so much “joined forces”; more like Daimler just not wanting to spend the money on a Euro VII-compliant diesel engine, and inviting Cummins to build theirs at Daimler’s facilities.
A sign of the times: nobody wants to make big investments in IC technology when the future is electrification. There will very likely be more of these.
Rather odd that Mercedes would be doing a joint venture with Cummins. Mercedes owns Detroit Diesel so why this partnership? Maybe its cheaper to buy someone elses engines then developing your own?
Cummins has been successful in the light-medium duty engine market for a long time. Good products. As an engine company it either lives or dies by its product. Gen sets, trucks, ag equipment, construction equipment, etc.
GM’s Detroit Diesel used to be widely used but the death of the two-strokes and no investment in any new product other then the 60 Series.
Cat management never seemed to fully support the truck business, it was a small contributor to the bottom line. Their products were generally revered but also expensive. It really surprised me when Cat dropped the on-highway engines. However my Cat engine rep said they felt they were always on thin ice.
International was in a good position as they had a good light-medium duty engine lineup. Unfortunately IH drove into the ditch with their 2010 emissions plan.
The cost of developing new engines and new emission regs really thinned the herd.
Because Daimler doesn’t want to sink money into (new) medium-duty truck/bus-diesels any longer. It’s a dead end.
All truck makers already offer electric models in the segment of medium-duty/short distance trucks, by the way. The transition (away from ICE) has begun, as mentioned.
And it’s six of one and half dozen of the other. What’s going to happen when these EV batteries end up in the dumpster? At least we know how to recycle IC engines. The battery issue is a dirty little topic nobody wants to talk about, and I work for a major chain auto parts supplier.
Batteries absolutely will be recycled. By mandate, especially in the EU, and because there will be significant demand for them, to harvest the materials to be recycled into new batteries. They will still be valuable.
There are already multiple companies located right here in the US that will be happy to take and recycle your existing old EV battery. I’m vastly oversimplifying here but it’s like the regular 12V lead acid battery; one of your employer’s single largest product lines is likely 12V batteries for which a core charge is charged every time and the vast majority of bad batteries come back to be broken down into its components and recycled. All for a $12 core charge. Now apply that to a vastly larger battery with a significantly larger weight of exotic metals. Nobody is putting these “into a dumpster”.
Here are a couple of links of companies doing this already:
https://li-cycle.com/
https://americanbatterytechnology.com/solutions/lithium-ion-battery-recycling/
Batteries of all types are prohibited from being thrown away in the garbage here everyone ognores it and rubbish trucks with 28 tonne payloads burn down with frightening regularity, I was taken to where one burning semi was left two days after the event it had been empitied onto the ground and was still burning, I was to retrieve the tractor unit and take it back that was fine but the trailer was buckled badly
Foton in China makes Cummins engines for its range of light trucks Ive seen their badge on a lot of smaller rigids and their pickups are fairly common, I dont know how large of a truck they build but the licence built engines have a mixed reliability record as do large Cummins engines, Ive been next door to their Auckland engine facility Volvo is located there and the numbers of dead engines around their yard is impressive or disappointing depending on your view, crates of new engines is an impressive inventory, since their workshop does not face the road the mechanics can be seen doing their thing and theres some truly massive engines being torn down for rebuilds I’d guess, Volvo trucks break down too but nobody is allowed to see them fix them,
Cummins guard their engine diagnosis software very closely I discovered from taking Freightliners to the approved dealership with engine issues the dealership has to get a Cummins tech in to diagnose faults, dealership tech can only read the in cab data that I could see but not know where to look for the fault, The company I worked for had a rule of drivers not to do any fault diagnosis or repairs
A lot of Chinese & Russian trucks are Cummins-powered, as well as PACCAR’s ex-DAF engines.
Does this mean Detroit is going the way of Cat, Perkins, et al with no more on-road engines?
At this rate, we’ll be using Clessie’s surname instead of Rudolf’s as a compression-ignition descriptive!
The PACCAR MX-11 (10.8 liter) and MX-13 (12.9 liter) are in-house engines, the others are sourced from Cummins.
Other than probably some Chinese companies, is Cummins the largest IC engine company that doesn’t also make vehicles? Seems like they must be doing some long-range planning about their future …
A family member works for Briggs & Stratton in Wisconsin. She told me that they are heavily involved in electrification.
“Deutz is the world’s biggest independent engine manufacturer”, according to their NL website.
The Cummins repair shop on the interstate in Greensboro, NC, was at one time apparently owned by a company called Onan. The huge signs were funny together.
Cummins has owned Onan for a while. The generator company was actually started by a guy named Onan, but the name always seemed too appropriate for a product that worked by itself to get the job done.