Cat to Unveil New Vocational Trucks at CONEXPO

Since June 2008, we’ve been reporting that the world’s largest manufacturer of earth moving equipment was teaming up with North America’s biggest producer of mid-range diesel engines and Class 6 to 8 commercial trucks. Caterpillar and Navistar have an agreement to design and develop a full line of Cat Vocational Trucks in North America. Finally, this March at CONEXPO-CON/AGG, Cat will unveil its new line of commercial trucks.

In the lead up to the launch, Caterpillar recently announced that its North American Cat dealer network will be fully prepared to offer whole-truck service and sales support for the company’s first ever Cat Vocational Truck, the Cat CT660. Since announcing the new line of on-highway Class 8 Cat Trucks in 2008, personnel at all 54 U.S. and Canadian dealerships, including their over 400 service locations and 2,300 service bays, have been engaged in intense training to ensure they are ready to meet customers’ product support needs for the trucks.

The capabilities dealers have been adding to provide customers with bumper-to-bumper support for the CT660 are a natural expansion of their existing truck capabilities and expertise, according to the director of the On-Highway Truck Group, George Taylor, who leads the design, development and launch of the new trucks.

“Caterpillar and Cat dealers already had extensive experience supporting on-highway customers from our 40-plus-year history of serving the truck industry, especially with powertrains,” Taylor said. “Cat dealers are excited about the new Cat trucks and thrilled to make them available to customers. Dealers have also shown extraordinary dedication to ramping up their facilities and expanding sales and service support capabilities to meet truck customer needs.”

According to Kerry Miller, truck business manager at Cat Dealership Carter Machinery, which serves Virginia and southern West Virginia, their dealership has taken an inter-departmental approach to ensure they have the processes in place to drive efficiencies.

“From sales to parts to service to any group impacted by the truck — and that’s everyone,” Miller said, “we’re all involved and engaged, and working hard to prepare, including our training department that has really stepped up to make sure our sales team and technicians are ready. Our preparation plan has been focused on truck uptime and preventive maintenance. We also have the infrastructure in place to support these trucks bumper-to-bumper through on-site service, with 120 bays in over a dozen shops and from our field service trucks. So we’ll be more than prepared to offer a whole-truck solution for customers.”

Cat Vocational Trucks will be sold and serviced exclusively through the Cat North American dealer network, with production beginning after CONEXPO for customer delivery later in the year. The Class 8 vocational trucks will offer custom solutions, including many different body types like dump, refuse, hauler and mixer, for a large variety of job applications.