Cummins Over-The-Air Updates : Under The Consent Decree

Cummins got a pass for the Wedge Capsule.

There was no need to prosecute it. It was a little engine-braking component with the unfortunate distinction of sounding like something Cummins’ crack diesel boffins had recovered from the remaining wreckage at Roswell. TCAP gave it two tweets, welcomed WC to the fleet and let everybody get on with their day.

Yesterday, 4 September 2026, however, the newsroom came back carrying software.

Cummins published “How Cummins over-the-air updates improve uptime and performance”, explaining how its next-generation Cummins over-the-air updates will allow software and parameter changes to reach its 2027 HELM engine platforms remotely.

An update that currently leaves a driver parked for nearly an hour, Cummins says, will take about five minutes.

Very useful.

Unfortunately, Cummins has a rather substantial service history when it comes to engine software.

Cummins Over-The-Air Updates In Five Minutes

There is a perfectly good commercial case for Cummins over-the-air updates.

A truck in a workshop is a truck that is not earning. Likewise, a machine sitting idle on a mine, farm or construction site is not doing the thing somebody bought the expensive bastard to do. Moving equipment to a dealership for a parameter change becomes even less attractive when that equipment happens to be working miles from one.

Cummins says fleet managers will be able to remotely alter Engine Control Module settings including road-speed governor and idle-shutdown parameters. Depending on the engine and OEM integration, fleets can also work with parameter templates involving cruise control, gear-down protection, engine-brake interaction and speed control.

Robin Aulakh, Cummins Optimized Performance Product Leader, makes the sensible point that even apparently modest downtime becomes significant across a large fleet. In particular, Cummins says a large fleet might change parameters around once a year during a five-year trade cycle, with the accumulated disruption potentially equating to a day of downtime.

Five minutes is better than an hour.

Nobody needs TCAP to fuck around with the arithmetic.

More importantly, the interesting part arrives when Cummins explains where all of this is going.

Vehicles, it says, are becoming increasingly “software-defined”.

Well.

Software-Defined

Cummins has some experience in that department.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says Cummins equipped approximately 630,000 model-year 2013-2019 RAM 2500 and RAM 3500 diesel vehicles with illegal software defeat devices that reduced the effectiveness of emissions controls during normal driving conditions.

Meanwhile, those vehicles, along with approximately 330,000 additional model-year 2019-2023 vehicles, also contained auxiliary emission-control devices that Cummins had failed to disclose through the certification process.

Nearly one million vehicles sat inside the wider settlement.

As a result, the civil Clean Air Act penalty reached $1.675 billion, the largest ever imposed under the Act. The overall settlement exceeded $2 billion once the wider obligations were included.

There is no need to stretch the metaphor.

Engine software had already become quite fucking expensive.

Five Minutes Meets 183 Pages

The money is only half the story.

The Cummins consent decree runs to 183 pages, and some of its more interesting passages concern exactly the thing Cummins is now advertising: changing engine software.

Under a section headed Software Lifecycle Management Control, Cummins must keep complete and accurate records of certified software configurations, together with changes to those configurations, in a centralised database.

For planned changes to previously certified software, the company must carry out pre-verification to establish that the changed calibration contains no defeat devices and that any auxiliary emission-control devices correspond with what has been disclosed to the EPA and California Air Resources Board.

In addition, that verification requires a dataset check comparing emissions-relevant software functions before and after the planned change.

Then comes Field Software Control.

The consent decree requires Cummins to carry out sample checks of software configurations in vehicles operating out in the field.

In other words, the present arrangement can be described rather compactly.

Cummins can move the software quickly.

The regulator would still quite like to know what the fucking software is.

Automatic Software Update Experience

Cummins demonstrated the coming technology at industry events earlier this year, including the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council meeting in Nashville.

Kerry-Leigh Goodier, Cummins Director of Digital Market Strategy & Management, says visitors responded positively to the “automatic software update experience”, particularly the reduction in driver involvement during calibration updates.

Again, entirely understandable.

After all, anybody who has watched a progress bar sit at 37% long enough to begin contemplating mortality can appreciate an update that gets the job done quickly.

The company also says the technology complements digital capabilities that can diagnose faults and, in some circumstances, identify potential component failures before they happen.

So this is useful technology.

It is also technology built around software, calibration, diagnostics and remote changes to engine behaviour.

Crucially, TCAP did not need to drag those words into the room.

Cummins published them itself.

The Consent Decree Is Still Current

This is not TCAP rummaging around in a dead controversy because the newsroom happened to use the word “software.”

Cummins filed its latest quarterly report on 4 August 2026. In it, the company says the settlement agreements became final and effective in April 2024 and continue to require recall work, mitigation projects, extended warranties, testing, corporate compliance measures and other obligations.

Furthermore, Cummins recorded a $2 billion charge to resolve the matters and says it made $1.9 billion of required payments during 2024.

More interestingly, the company says it has subsequently recorded additional immaterial amounts relating to stipulated penalties it determined were probable and estimable.

Its filing also states that any future non-compliance with the settlement agreements will likely expose Cummins to further stipulated penalties and other adverse consequences.

That was filed last month.

The paperwork is not gathering dust.

It is still sitting on the fucking desk.

Cybersecurity, Privacy And One Other Thing

Cummins spends part of its new article discussing security and control.

Aulakh says secure connectivity, including cybersecurity, is foremost in the company’s thinking when designing these systems. Goodier, meanwhile, explains that fleets may regard information about the parameter combinations that work best for their particular operations as proprietary, and Cummins says it does not share those insights between fleets.

Good.

If somebody is remotely altering the behaviour of commercial engines, cybersecurity should be taken seriously. Similarly, customer data should be protected, software deployment should be reliable and fleets should retain sensible control over their equipment.

Yet there is another form of control sitting beside those things now.

Regulatory control.

The EPA and CARB did not leave that particular feature optional.

The Software Is Not The Problem

Nothing about Cummins over-the-air updates is inherently sinister.

Quite the opposite. Cutting downtime from nearly an hour to around five minutes is useful. For remote operations, avoiding a journey back to a service location is useful too. Making software management less intrusive for drivers also has obvious value.

That is precisely why the corporate history matters more, not less.

Cummins is now selling software agility as a customer benefit while simultaneously operating under enforceable controls created because regulators found serious failures involving engine-control software, certification and disclosure.

Those two facts belong in the same room.

One is the sales pitch.

The other is the service record.

Keep It Current

Cummins closes its article by explaining that, as vehicles and equipment become increasingly software-defined, its OTA capabilities are intended to help customers keep those systems current while maintaining control over their equipment and data.

Excellent.

Keep the software current and secure. Let the trucks keep earning, while the calibration records remain accurate and the disclosures complete.

Most importantly, when an update can travel from Cummins to an engine in five minutes, remember that the Software Lifecycle Management Control section of the consent decree travels with it.

The Wedge Capsule can go back to Roswell.

The software stays under observation.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project