On 19 August, TCAP published Old News, New Low-Down after watching Cummins spend August rummaging through its archive, updating old natural-gas articles and presenting yesterday’s sales arguments to a 2026 audience.
Apparently somebody found the other button on the time machine.
The next day, Cummins published Inside the Cummins X15 and X10 Aftertreatment System for 2027. We had barely finished mocking the company for travelling backwards before the newsroom disappeared forwards instead.
Perhaps the timing is completely innocent.
If Cummins is not reacting to TCAP, however, it is doing a remarkably fucking good job of looking like it.
Wednesday: the past.
Thursday: 2027.
At some point, perhaps Cummins might consider publishing something from the present.
Welcome To Tomorrow. Again.
Cummins’ latest article takes us inside the aftertreatment system intended for its 2027 X15 and X10 diesel engines. There are twin SCR canisters, electric heaters, a dedicated alternator, the familiar single DEF doser and plenty of reassuring language about simplicity, maintenance and customer comfort.
Technically, there is real engineering here. Stricter NOx requirements mean manufacturers need better thermal management and more effective aftertreatment across a wider range of operating conditions. Cummins has chosen parallel SCR canisters rather than simply stretching one giant exhaust-treatment tube along the chassis, while electric heat allows the catalysts to reach useful temperatures more quickly.
Fine.
Unfortunately, Cummins has also chosen to package all of this as another excursion into the glorious future, which becomes slightly funnier when you discover that much of the future has already been sitting on its website for eighteen fucking months.
In March 2025, the same Cummins newsroom published Five Facts of 2027 X15 Maintenance. That article already described the Twin Module system, two side-by-side aftertreatment assemblies, twin five-kilowatt heaters, a dedicated 48-volt electrical system and the effort to preserve existing DPF maintenance intervals.
So yesterday TCAP accused Cummins of recycling its past.
Today Cummins published the future.
The future is recycled too.
Outstanding work.
Same Tomorrow, New Wrapper
The August 2026 article tells readers that Cummins is retaining a single DEF injector which has already accumulated millions of miles in existing diesel applications. Product Manager Ross Hauswald explains that customers find this comforting because Cummins has avoided a dual-dosing arrangement.
There is nothing inherently wrong with reusing proven hardware. In engineering, that can be exactly the sensible thing to do.
It does, however, create an amusing problem for the marketing.
Cummins wants the 2027 system to feel simultaneously new enough to represent engineering progress and old enough to reassure everybody that nothing frightening has changed.
Welcome to innovation by comfort blanket.
The doser is the same. Service intervals are supposed to remain familiar. Weight stays level with the previous model. The heater is described as maintenance-free. The architecture is new, except where being old sounds more reassuring.
Cummins even supplies the perfect line itself. Hauswald says the company is using the same doser and same part number used today, before explaining that it will use it again tomorrow.
Yesterday’s TCAP article could barely have commissioned better copy.
Same part today. Same part tomorrow. New newsroom article whenever required.
Up To Three Per Cent Of Something
Then we reach the numbers.
Cummins says the X15 is expected to deliver up to a 3% improvement in fuel economy over its predecessor.
“Up to” remains one of corporate communications’ hardest-working employees. It can carry an entire marketing department on its fucking back.
More importantly, the article does not provide the test protocol behind that figure. There is no duty cycle, fleet sample, operating profile, payload, weather condition or detailed comparison methodology presented alongside it.
That does not mean the improvement is fictitious. Cummins has spent serious engineering resources on reducing parasitic losses, backpressure and thermal inefficiency.
It means the reader receives the result without the workings.
That becomes more interesting when Cummins’ March 2025 article described base fuel-economy improvement of 3% to 4%, rising to up to 7% when paired with an optimised Cummins powertrain.
Different configurations and baselines can produce different figures. Fair enough.
Nevertheless, a reader arriving eighteen months later now gets “up to 3%” without any explanation of how that figure relates to the earlier 3% to 4% base claim or the magnificent 7% headline available when the rest of the Cummins catalogue joins the party.
Perhaps the lower figure reflects the no-defeat-device edition.
Apparently fuel economy improves depending on which brochure you have open.
Forty-Four Per Cent. Eighty Per Cent. Eight Hundred Thousand Miles. Lovely Numbers.
The numerical parade continues.
Cummins says the parallel SCR arrangement reduces backpressure by 44%. It says the redesigned system accommodates the catalyst required to reduce NOx by more than 80%. The DPFs, meanwhile, are engineered to last up to 800,000 miles.
Those are wonderfully precise-looking figures.
What the article does not provide is an accompanying technical paper showing the test conditions behind the 44%, the exact baseline underlying the 80%, or field evidence demonstrating 800,000-mile DPF life across representative customer duty cycles.
Again, that does not automatically make the claims wrong.
It makes them manufacturer claims published on the manufacturer’s website using manufacturer employees as the principal technical sources.
There is a difference.
“Engineered to last up to 800,000 miles” is particularly elegant corporate language. It is a design claim, not a guarantee that every filter will reach 800,000 miles in whatever filthy, idling, stop-start bastard of a duty cycle a customer throws at it.
The number looks wonderfully solid.
The sentence around it still has suspension travel.
The Journalist Works For The Newsroom That Sells The Engine
The article carries the byline of Tom Quimby, described as an On-highway Journalist.
To be clear, Quimby has legitimate trade-media credentials. Cummins lists previous work appearing in outlets including Commercial Carrier Journal, Overdrive, Equipment World and The Washington Times, and says he has covered Class 1 through 8 commercial vehicles since 2015.
So there is no need to pretend somebody from Accounts wandered into the newsroom and discovered WordPress.
The more interesting point concerns the product being produced.
This is journalism-shaped material hosted by Cummins, about a Cummins product, built largely around quotations from Cummins product personnel and ending with Cummins announcing that it has “checked several boxes” in producing a dependable package.
There is no hostile engineer in the article.
No independent fleet operator produces test results.
No third-party laboratory checks the performance numbers.
Nobody turns up halfway through and asks whether “up to” would mind emptying its pockets.
The professional biography may say journalist.
The surrounding building still says Cummins.
EPA27 Is Not A Frozen Target Either
Cummins repeatedly frames the new system around EPA’s model-year 2027 heavy-duty emissions requirements, and those requirements are real. The EPA’s heavy-duty criteria-pollutant programme introduced significantly tougher NOx controls beginning with model year 2027, including broader operating conditions and longer useful-life requirements.
However, there is another awkward little piece of present tense.
In July 2026, the EPA published proposed amendments affecting compliance provisions, testing, useful-life periods and emissions-related warranty provisions for model-year 2027 and later heavy-duty highway engines. The agency is also proposing nonconformance penalties for certain heavy-duty engine manufacturers.
The public-comment period does not even close until 29 August 2026.
That does not erase the underlying 2027 NOx programme, nor does it mean Cummins cannot engineer against it.
It does mean the regulatory landscape surrounding “EPA27” remains active while Cummins writes about tomorrow as though somebody has already laminated the rulebook.
Even the future is still receiving tracked changes.
Maintenance-Neutral, Except For The New Stuff
Cummins also works hard to reassure customers that the additional aftertreatment hardware will not create a maintenance headache.
The heaters require no routine maintenance. There is no 48-volt battery. The company says overall system weight remains unchanged, while service intervals should remain familiar.
Again, sensible engineering objectives.
Yet Cummins’ own earlier material acknowledged that the 48-volt architecture brings a dedicated belt-driven alternator and therefore belt maintenance, even if the company expects that work to align with normal replacement schedules. It also acknowledged that the new architecture requires additional service training.
That is not scandalous.
It is simply what happens when engineers add equipment to meet tougher requirements.
Marketing then arrives afterwards and attempts to describe the additional equipment as though it materialised under the chassis without inconveniencing anybody.
A heater, alternator, second assembly and revised architecture apparently enter the workshop carrying a note saying:
Please continue as normal.
HELM Keeps Hedging
This also lands neatly beside Cummins HELM.
HELM stands for Higher Efficiency, Lower Emissions and Multiple Fuels, but increasingly it looks like an industrial-strength hedge around whatever the energy market eventually chooses.
Diesel remains. Natural gas gets another push. Hydrogen sits somewhere further down the road. Battery systems occupy another lane. Hybridisation is available when useful.
Cummins calls that customer choice.
TCAP calls it what diversified technology portfolios have always been called when the future refuses to cooperate: not putting all your fucking money on one horse.
There is commercial logic in that. The problem comes when ordinary portfolio hedging is dressed as clairvoyance.
Cummins does not know precisely what the heavy-duty power market will look like in ten years.
Neither does TCAP.
The difference is that I am not building a branding architecture around pretending otherwise.
If This Is Not Reactionary, It Deserves An Award For The Impression
And that brings us back to the timing.
On 19 August, TCAP published an article arguing that Cummins had been dragging old fuel and technology content back through the newsroom as its strategic emphasis moved away from the hydrogen future it once promoted so aggressively.
On 20 August, Cummins published a piece explicitly pointed at 2027.
That does not prove somebody in Columbus read TCAP over breakfast, spat coffee across a monitor and shouted
“QUICK. FIND SOMETHING FROM THE FUTURE”.
We have been here before.
TCAP noticed that Life at the Company had somehow reached the stage where Cummins was profiling the dead.
The next day?
“QUICK. FIND SOMEONE WITH A PULSE”. Enter Ana Watts.
Again, perhaps complete coincidence.
Cummins just has an extraordinary talent for producing the exact fucking counterexample immediately after TCAP points at the pattern.
Sadly.
But context matters.
TCAP has already documented changes in customer naming, employee naming, archive activity and the subjects Cummins chooses to push. Now we mock backward-looking newsroom output and the next fresh article arrives with 2027 bolted to the headline.
Coincidence remains available.
It is simply becoming a very funny fucking coincidence.
If Cummins is not reacting to TCAP, it is doing a remarkably good job of looking like it.
Anything But Now
Perhaps that is the larger problem.
The past is useful because Cummins can select it. Apologising for it is optional, obviously.
The future is useful because nobody can audit it yet. Always tomorrow.
The present is considerably less cooperative.
And considerably more diesely.
The present contains current accounts, current impairments, current market conditions, current product demand and the consequences of strategies that were themselves once sold as tomorrow.
TCAP caught Cummins rummaging through the past.
The next day, Cummins opened the other door and invited us into the future, with yesterday’s material.
Fine.
We will go wherever the newsroom wants.
It would just be nice, eventually, to meet them in fucking 2026.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cummins – Inside the Cummins X15 and X10 Aftertreatment System for 2027
- Cummins – Five Facts of 2027 X15 Maintenance
- Cummins – Next-Generation X15 Diesel Engine
- US EPA – Heavy-Duty Engine and Vehicle Standards
- US EPA – Proposed Amendments and Nonconformance Penalties for Heavy-Duty Engines
- US EPA – Cummins Vehicle Emission Control Violations Settlement
- The Cummins Accountability Project – Cummins Confidential Special : Old News, New Low-Down