The confidence, excitement and
passion for the ProStar project simply slipped into space
I
t is a brutally long way from Uluru to Dandenong, especially via Chicago and the big Cat-house in Peoria.
That, however, is the decade-long mental excursion that needs to be made to gain any sense of the circumstances leading to the recent announcement that International ProStar will soon join Cat trucks on the scrapheap of arguably the most poorly conceived and overtly cynical corporate attempt to become part of the Australian trucking landscape. It all starts at Uluru in the ageless expanse of Central Australia with the big budget debut of Cat trucks in late 2010. As far as new truck introductions go in our part of the world, they don’t come much grander than this. And the blunt reality is that it needed to be something special. Very special! After all, the event took place just two years after the decision by Cat to quit the truck engine business, effectively abandoning the loyal legions of truck operators with yellow blood coursing through their veins. With the birth of the truck, however, the ambitious and somewhat arrogant hope from Cat’s perspective was that all would be forgiven and lovers of yellow iron would literally flock to a truck bearing the famous moniker, punched by C13 and C15 Acert engines.
Consequently, around 300 guests and their partners were flown to Uluru to be part of what was billed as the ‘world launch’ of Cat-branded trucks. Apart from first view of the hardware, the obvious aim of the exercise was to let the world know that the vast Cat organisation, with all its strength, resources and wealth, had formed a 50/50 partnership with US truck manufacturing giant Navistar. The new entity was called NC2, ostensibly reflecting the combined strength of the two brands, with the sole aim of tackling the onhighway truck business. What’s more, it was made plain that the US market, with its significantly tougher emissions regulations, was not part of the plan. Sure, the platform for the assault was a Cat-branded version of Navistar’s supremely popular International ProStar – back then battling Freightliner’s Cascadia for domination of the US heavy-duty market – but it was obvious that the engines powering the Cat trucks were somewhat ‘old world’ in an emissions sense. Simply stated, engines that were no longer compliant with US standards. Emerging in the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, NC2 was formed in September 2009, soon after Caterpillar’s announcement that it would not develop engines to meet US 2010 emissions
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