Caterpillar to develop its own on-highway trucks

Caterpillar and Navistar are to end their collaboration on the design and manufacture of on-highway vocational trucks. Caterpillar says it will begin independently designing and manufacturing these vehicles at its plant in Victoria, Texas.

Chris Chadwick, director of Caterpillar’s global on-highway truck group said, “The on-highway vocational truck product family is important to our product line. Customers like our trucks and want to include them in their fleets in a variety of heavy duty applications such as dump trucks, mixers, haulers or one of the other configurations we offer. To continue to provide the best solution for our customers, we will bring the design and manufacturing of this product into Caterpillar, and the production specifically to Victoria.”

Truck maker Navistar meanwhile said it would launch a new range of premium vocational trucks early next year incorporating some of the technology from the joint venture with Cat. It added that it will continue to manufacture trucks for Caterpillar until the end of 2016. Caterpillar said its own production in Texas was expected to begin in mid-2016.

The joint venture between Navistar and Caterpillar was announced in 2008, and the first model, the CT660 was launched in 2011.