Customer Corner : Kubota – Cummins Power, Fake Made-In-USA Stickers And The Tractor Family With Asbestos In The Family Album

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Cummins gave Kubota’s biggest tractor ever the usual engineering halo: power, reliability, long-term value and enough diesel romance to make a farm brochure sweat. But zoom out from the orange paint and the Kubota family album starts looking less wholesome: asbestos deaths, false Made-in-USA claims, rodent-chewed wiring allegations, crash-hazard recalls and a tiny EPA compliance fart in the corner. Big tractor energy. Bigger corporate compost heap.

Meet The Orange Beast

Kubota is not some tinpot shed operation bolting engines into lawn toys behind a garden centre. It is a global machinery giant, famous for tractors, construction equipment, utility vehicles and that bright orange paint that makes every machine look like it is either here to feed a nation or reverse over your foot.

Cummins liked the look of the relationship enough to turn it into a case study. The star was Kubota’s M8 tractor, described by Cummins as Kubota’s largest tractor at the time of launch. A 19,510 lb machine built for higher-horsepower agricultural work, with the power coming from a Cummins B6.7 Performance Series engine in 180 hp or 200 hp form.

Beautiful, isn’t it? Kubota brings the tractor. Cummins brings the diesel heart. Everyone brings a press release. Somewhere in a marketing department, a man types “reliability” with one hand and high-fives a spreadsheet with the other.

The Cummins pitch is exactly what you would expect: power, performance, lower emissions language, long-term value, customer confidence, engineering muscle. The tractor becomes a kind of agricultural superhero. A muscular orange beast stomping across the field, saving farmers from inefficiency one horsepower at a time.

Then you look at Kubota’s wider record and the brochure starts to smell less like fresh soil and more like a parts counter with a guilty conscience.

The Biggest Tractor And The Small Print

The funny thing about Cummins case studies is that they never really lie in the obvious way. They do not need to. The trick is cropping.

Crop to the engine. Crop to the machine. Crop to the horsepower. Crop to the customer smile. Crop to the bit where a sales team can say “look, this respected global brand trusted us with the powertrain”. Then leave everything else just outside the frame, like a dead raccoon behind a show home.

In Kubota’s case, that crop is doing some serious labour.

Because Kubota is not just the orange tractor people. Kubota is also the company whose name is attached to one of Japan’s most notorious asbestos awakenings, a modern record-breaking Made-in-USA penalty, safety recalls for crash hazards, and a class-action complaint over wiring allegedly attractive to rodents. That does not mean every Kubota machine is cursed. It means the cuddly tractor glow has some corporate soot on it.

Cummins, naturally, did not invite that soot into the case study. Cummins wanted the clean shot: big tractor, big engine, big trust.

Customer Corner prefers the wider lens.

The Asbestos In The Family Album

Long before the M8 tractor was being polished for North American agriculture, Kubota’s name was already attached to something far darker: the 2005 “Kubota Shock” asbestos scandal in Japan.

In June 2005, Kubota publicly disclosed that 51 workers from its former Kanzaki asbestos-cement pipe plant in Amagasaki had died from asbestos-related diseases, along with five nearby residents who developed mesothelioma. That disclosure helped blow open wider public awareness of Japan’s asbestos disaster. This was not a minor corporate embarrassment or a “lessons learned” footnote. This was industrial disease crawling out of the wall.

That is the bit the orange paint cannot cover.

To be precise, this is historic Kubota Corporation material, not a claim that Cummins’ M8 tractor project had anything to do with asbestos. TCAP is not here to weld two unrelated pipes together and call it plumbing. The point is simpler: Kubota’s corporate name carries a public-health history that sits very awkwardly beside the wholesome machinery branding.

You can sell the future in orange. You can bolt in a Cummins engine and call it progress. But the past still sits there in the ledger, coughing dust.

Made In USA, Made Somewhere Else

Then comes the bit that was practically written for satire by a bored regulator with a sharp pencil.

In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Kubota North America Corporation would pay a $2 million civil penalty for falsely labelling some replacement parts as “Made in USA” when they were made elsewhere. The FTC said it was the largest ever civil penalty in a Made-in-USA case. Kubota itself acknowledged the settlement, saying some replacement-parts packaging incorrectly identified the country of origin.

That is almost too perfect. Kubota sells the rugged, patriotic, dirt-under-the-fingernails farm-machine aura, then gets clipped because the parts sticker was apparently doing more flag-waving than the supply chain could support.

And this was not Kubota’s first dance with the Made-in-USA fiddle. The FTC’s own record shows a 1999 Kubota Tractor Corporation case involving Made-in-USA advertising claims for lawn and garden tractors. So the 2024 penalty was not some first awkward stumble into the labelling swamp. It was more like finding the same cow in the same ditch years later, wearing a fresh ribbon.

For TCAP purposes, that is gold. Cummins helps power Kubota’s biggest tractor ever. Kubota gets done for Made-in-USA bullshit on parts. The headline writes itself, then reverses over a bollard.

Rodents, Wires And The Soy-Based Buffet

Then there is the rodent wiring lawsuit, which sounds like something a drunk mechanic invented to win a bar argument.

In 2018, Burgess Properties LLC filed a class-action complaint against Kubota Tractor Corporation and others in Alabama. The complaint alleged that Kubota vehicles used soy-based or bio-based wiring materials that attracted rodents, leading to chewed wiring, failures, repair costs and other headaches.

To be clear, these were allegations in a lawsuit, not a final judicial finding that Kubota had intentionally opened an all-you-can-eat rodent buffet under the bonnet. Precision matters. But as a piece of corporate theatre, it is magnificent.

The “green” wiring angle gives the whole thing a nasty little twist. A manufacturer gets to enjoy the eco-friendly material glow, then customers allegedly find out the local wildlife has mistaken the wiring harness for a snack drawer. Somewhere between sustainability and pest control, the tractor owner is standing there with a dead machine and a repair bill, wondering whether the mouse at least left a review.

Cummins was selling power and reliability into the Kubota machine story. The wider Kubota ecosystem was meanwhile dealing with accusations that bits of equipment had become rodent tapas. You do not need to overstate it. The image does enough damage on its own.

Crash-Hazard Orange

Kubota also brings the modern recall trail. Again, recalls happen. Machines fail. Manufacturers issue fixes. Not every recall is a scandal, and pretending otherwise is how idiots turn product safety into pantomime.

But repeated crash-hazard recalls are still useful context when Cummins is busy polishing “reliability” for the brochure shelf.

In 2025, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of Kubota RTV-series utility vehicles because a ball joint connected to the front suspension arm could loosen and separate, causing loss of wheel support and posing a crash hazard. The recall covered around 49,640 vehicles.

That same year, the CPSC also announced a recall of Kubota MX5400DTC utility tractors because the clutch cable could break, resulting in reduced braking power and posing a crash hazard. That recall covered about 2,600 units in the United States, with more sold in Canada.

This is not “Kubota kills everyone” territory. It is not that kind of piece. It is the duller, more useful point: the Kubota reliability aura, like every corporate reliability aura, has a service department behind it and a regulator occasionally tapping the glass.

Cummins sells reliability by the gallon. Kubota sells tough orange machinery. Then the public record quietly reminds everyone that toughness still gets recalled when the front end can shit itself.

A Small EPA Fart In The Corner

There is also a minor Clean Air Act compliance matter involving Kubota Engine America Corporation, resolved through an EPA expedited settlement agreement. It is not a Cummins-style emissions-cheating opera. It is not a defeat-device scandal. It is not the sort of thing that deserves a marching band and a courtroom sketch artist.

But it belongs in the atmosphere of the piece because it sits exactly where TCAP likes to look: the gap between clean corporate language and grubby regulatory reality.

Kubota’s main dirt here is not emissions fraud. The big-ticket material is asbestos, labelling, recalls and product litigation. The EPA item is just the tiny diesel burp at the back of the room, reminding everyone that engine companies and compliance paperwork are never very far apart.

The Cummins Crop Job

This is why Kubota belongs in Customer Corner.

Cummins did not write a case study about asbestos. It did not write one about false origin labels. It did not write one about rodent wiring allegations. It did not write one about crash-hazard recalls. It wrote about the M8 tractor and the Cummins B6.7 engine, because that is the flattering frame.

That is how the machine works. Pick the cleanest inch of the customer relationship. Polish it until it squeaks. Publish it as proof of trust, innovation and performance. Then hope nobody walks around the back of the barn and notices the rest of the machinery lying there in bits.

Kubota is not the filthiest customer in the Cummins cabinet. It is worse than that for PR purposes: it is normal. A respectable global name. A household machinery brand. A company that can sit comfortably in a Cummins case study without looking like an obvious reputational landmine at first glance.

And then the public record starts talking.

Asbestos. Fake origin labels. Rodent wiring allegations. Recalls. EPA paperwork. All sitting behind the bright orange machine while Cummins grins at the engine bay.

The Customer Corner Lesson

The lesson is not that the Kubota M8 is a bad tractor. TCAP is not standing in a field with a clipboard pretending to be Top Gear for farmers. The point is that Cummins keeps using customer stories as reputation laundering: a little engineering pride here, a little reliability language there, a little clean crop around the machinery, and suddenly the wider corporate record has been pushed just far enough out of shot.

Kubota is perfect because the contrast is so stupidly visual. Huge orange tractor. Cummins diesel muscle. Patriotic sticker trouble. Rodent wiring allegations. Crash-hazard recalls. Historic asbestos deaths sitting in the family album like a corpse at a harvest festival.

Cummins wants the reader to see power.

Customer Corner sees the whole bloody field.

And in that field, Kubota’s biggest tractor is not just hauling crops.

It is dragging a long, ugly paper trail behind it.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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