Cummins is busy again. Expanding. Announcing. Congratulating itself. Pumping out press releases like a nervous salesman spraying aftershave before a meeting that’s already gone wrong.

New buildings. New engines. Old nostalgia. Quarterly numbers polished until they squeak. And underneath it all, the same question Cummins never answers straight.

What exactly is the future here?

Because if you read their latest run of coverage and releases back-to-back, what you don’t get is a clean transition story. You get a company clinging to the present with diesel-stained fingernails while pretending the past and the future are interchangeable.

Let’s start where the local press obligingly bent over.

Darlington Gets A New Shed. Questions Get Fuck All

The Northern Echo does what it does best.
Pom-poms out. Quotes lifted. Council leaders beaming like they’ve just won a raffle.

Cummins is expanding its Darlington site. New warehouse. Internal automation. Logistics brought on-site. A “fantastic opportunity” apparently. Jobs. Growth. Prosperity. End of article. End of thinking.

But here’s the question no one bothered to ask.

What the fuck is Cummins actually expanding for?

Where is hydrogen in this plan?
Where is Accelera?
Where is “Destination Zero”?

Because if you believed Cummins’ investor decks from the last few years, Darlington should be knee-deep in green ambition. Electrolysers. Clean power. A transition hub. Something that looks like the future rather than a bigger version of the present.

Instead, hydrogen doesn’t even get a mention.
Accelera is nowhere.
Not a sentence. Not a footnote. Not a whisper.

And that silence matters. Because only days earlier, Cummins quietly admitted it’s taking hundreds of millions in charges tied to its electrolyser business. Strategic review. Reset expectations. Corporate euphemisms for “this isn’t working and we don’t want to talk about it”.

So what is this new facility actually for?
Diesel logistics?
Spare parts?
Data centre backup engines dressed up as “resiliency”?

If this expansion was about a clean transition, hydrogen wouldn’t vanish from the story. If Accelera was real, it wouldn’t be treated like an embarrassing relative you pretend doesn’t exist when company comes round.

Darlington isn’t being sold the future.
It’s being sold scale.
Bigger sheds. Faster throughput. Same engine.

The Echo didn’t ask.
The council didn’t ask.
So we will.

India Keeps Grinding While Columbus Counts

While the UK cheers new buildings, Cummins India quietly reports another quarter of “steady” performance.

Sales broadly flat. Margins fine. Profits ticking along. Management pleased with itself. The usual corporate patter about resilience, execution and long-term opportunity.

This is the part Cummins never likes framed plainly.

India works because it’s cheap, predictable and politically convenient. It always has. Cummins has been dining out on Indian labour for decades while wrapping it in language about partnership and growth.

Exports wobble? Domestic demand softens? Doesn’t matter. The model holds because the cost base stays low and the risks stay elsewhere.

No talk here of worker conditions.
No talk of pressure.
No talk of who absorbs the shocks when “near-term uncertainty” hits.

India keeps the machine fed while the parent company experiments, retreats and rewrites the narrative elsewhere.

The X15 And The Art Of Self-Fellatio

Then there’s the X15 series. Part two of three. Cummins praising Cummins for Cummins.

Best uptime yet?
Best reliability yet?
Best everything yet?

Christ alive.

They drag out test fleets, load weights, gradients and statistics like receipts from a long lunch. Look how tough it is. Look how dependable. Look how proud we are of ourselves.

What they don’t say is just as important.

They don’t mention the emissions cheating history that made “reliability” a very expensive word.
They don’t mention that diesel dominance is now being sold as a virtue rather than a problem.
They don’t explain why, if the future is green, so much effort goes into perfecting yesterday’s engine.

This isn’t innovation. It’s optimisation. Polishing. Sweating the asset while pretending it’s progress.

Q4 Numbers And The Vanishing Green Act

The Q4 results told the same story, louder.

Strong quarter. Strong margins. Strong EBITDA.
And right there in the middle, the quiet confession.

Hundreds of millions written down on the electrolyser business. Accelera trimmed. Hydrogen expectations lowered. Reality reasserting itself.

Meanwhile, Distribution and Power Systems soar thanks to data centre demand. The AI boom needs power. The grid coughs. Diesel generators wait patiently outside server farms like bouncers at a nightclub no one wants to admit they rely on.

Call it “mission critical” if you like.
It’s still fossil fuel dependency with a new haircut.

So here’s the obvious question.

When does the next fake-green narrative launch?
What replaces hydrogen in the brochure?
Batteries? Microgrids? Another acronym with a halo taped to it?

Because the last one just cost them nearly half a billion.

And Now For The Founder Cosplay

Finally, Cummins rolls out the nostalgia piece. The founder. The grit. The ingenuity. The myth.

Clessie Cummins as folk hero. Tinkerer. Risk taker. Diesel pioneer.

It’s a lovely story. Carefully timed. Comforting. Safe.

But if you think about where the company is now, it lands differently.

A firm fined for cheating.
Retreating from its flagship green promise.
Leaning hard on data centre diesel to keep the numbers looking healthy.
Papering over structural questions with awards and press releases.

If Clessie Cummins really believed in engineering integrity, reliability and honesty, he wouldn’t be applauding this shit. He’d be asking what happened.

He’d be asking why “Destination Zero” keeps moving.
He’d be asking why green projects get quietly written down while diesel warehouses get fast-tracked.
He’d be asking who all this narrative is actually for.

The Pattern Is The Point

Put it all together and the picture sharpens.

Cummins expands logistics while hydrogen disappears.
It praises engines while retreating from transition.
It celebrates founders while ducking accountability.
It counts awards while burying charges.

Nothing here is accidental.
Nothing here is new.

And if you’re wondering whether Cummins sees TCAP as a risk?

They don’t mention us. Corporations never point at the crack in the wall. They just repaint around it and hope no one presses.

And unlike the Echo, we’re still pressing (if they ever were).

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Cummins Confidential : Warehouses, Wankery And The Founder Rolling In His Grave