Cummins is packing for Hannover with its usual cargo of contradictions – a century-old love affair with diesel, dressed up as innovation. They call it “power technology”. Everyone else calls it what it is: a corpse in makeup, still pretending to breathe.
The Great Agritechnica Pretend
They’ll take the stage at Agritechnica 2025, engines buffed, lights set to halo, PR flacks cooing about reliability and “integration flexibility”. Underneath it all? The same smoke-belching junk they’ve been flogging for decades.
Their star turn is the “new” 4.5L structural engine – smaller, lighter, cheaper to build – and the “Next Gen X15 Off-Highway”, which sounds exciting until you realise it’s the same X15 diesel Cummins quietly delayed from early to late 2026 because no one wanted it.
Now it’s being rolled into a field and sold to farmers as progress. Diesel in a new hat. “Fuel agnostic” on paper, still drinking the same black stuff in reality.
Diesel With a Halo
Cummins’ VP Marina Savelli is out front with the usual sermon: partnerships, dependability, “global footprint”. All the soft-focus words that mean nothing and hide everything. Philip Dawson, the agriculture lead, declares they’re “committed to diesel”. That’s not commitment – that’s addiction.
And it’s convenient timing. The U.S. X15 delay looked weak, so they needed a quick European distraction. Cue Hannover. Cue farmers. Cue nostalgia. The strategy’s as old as the exhaust note – drown the stench of stagnation in the noise of heritage.
The Fossil and the Farce
Cummins loves to romanticise its first farm engine from 1919, a six-horsepower oil burner launched at the Indiana State Fair. They say it “powered progress”. It really powered a century of pollution and denial dressed as engineering pride.
Now they’re recycling that same legacy in Germany, preaching reliability while regulators tighten the screws and investors whisper about stranded assets. “We are committed to diesel”, they boast. You’d think the record $1.6 billion Clean Air Act fine might’ve knocked that line out of the script. But Cummins doesn’t learn; it rebrands.
The Green Screen Trick
Watch how they spin it. “Fuel agnostic” means “diesel today, hydrogen tomorrow, if it ever pays”. “Flex module” means “we can bolt the same system onto anything and call it new”. “Efficiency” means “the regulator’s watching”. Every sentence in the press release is a euphemism for panic.
They’ve already shown this X15 at Bauma with a hydrogen head, a marketing stunt for a technology they aren’t actually selling. The one they are selling burns diesel – the fuel they can’t quit.
The Darlington Line
The new 4.5L is built at their Darlington plant in the UK – the same factory recently turned into a PR carnival of family fun days and selective memory. Cummins talks about “community,” but the real export from Darlington is spin. Now they’re linking that same plant to their “next generation” diesel. You can’t make this up.
The Bottom Line
Agritechnica 2025 isn’t a celebration of innovation. It’s a memorial service with balloons. Cummins will smile for the cameras, talk about heritage, and polish their diesel relics until the reflection blinds the audience. The X15 is still delayed. The future’s still slipping away.
This isn’t evolution – it’s taxidermy.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project