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[Renze]

So, they payd royalties for combustion technology to meet EPA 2007, but when this technology did not suffice for EPA 2010 they sued EPA ? It doesnt make sense. If a Turkish manufacturer buys the rights to produce the Ford 5000 of the 1970's, would they sue New Holland when this design doesnt meet current TIER 3B emissions, required to sell it in the Western markets ?

The real problem is that the EPA wears two different hats: they want to sell technology wearing the hat of the engineering corporation, and wearing the other hat, they want to enforce law... Though principally injust, it doesnt give Navistar any leverage in a law court to demand the right to keep using EPA 2007 technology for EPA 2010 emissions.

Another point of view, citing sources from the management level:
Death By Hubris? The Catastrophic Decision That Could Bankrupt A Great American Manufacturer - Forbes

 

[JasG]

Here is one story from 2009 when the EPA flipped and said they would allow SCR. Up until that point they would not certify an SCR engine and the European connected engine makers kept pushing for it.

EPA Approves SCR Use for 2010 | Transport Topics Online | Trucking, Freight Transportation and Logistics News

Here is another.
Navistar challenges EPA diesel regulations - NYTimes.com

When EPA issued the rule in 2001, the agency said SCR technology, which is already widely used to control NOx from industrial plants and other stationary pollution sources, would not be available to meet the standard. But the 2009 guidance document approved SCR technology, amending its 2001 determination that the technology was infeasible.

It also just happens to be that they allowed this when the fraud that both the EPA and CARB did when setting these rules was coming to light. Over estimating emissions and false data on lives saved etc.

The story you posted from Forbes doesn't bring up the fact that until 2009 all over the road engines were EGR in the US. Or that Caterpillar, John Deere and Kubota are all using EGR for now and 2 of the 3 are working on SCR now and have been since the rules change. That Caterpillar, the largest truck engine maker at the time dropped out from the on road market from what I have read mainly because of the rules change. The story sounds like something the competition wrote IMO. I also go to some trade shows and people from Cat and Navistar have both told me it really screwed them because they were working within the rules at the time. That it can take years to get and engine certified and all the testing. By changing the rules that late in the game it gave a huge advantage to European builders who had been using SCR.

 

[JasG]

Here is a little information on some of the fraud CARB committed. The EPA in many cases works with or just rubber stamps CARBS work. The fraud on diesels goes back to the 1990's though.

Overestimate fueled state's landmark diesel law - SFGate

The pollution estimate in question was too high - by 340 percent, according to the California Air Resources Board, the state agency charged with researching and adopting air quality standards. The estimate was a key part in the creation of a regulation adopted by the Air Resources Board in 2007, a rule that forces businesses to cut diesel emissions by replacing or making costly upgrades to heavy-duty, diesel-fueled off-road vehicles used in construction and other industries.

The staff of the powerful and widely respected Air Resources Board said the overestimate is largely due to the board calculating emissions before the economy slumped, which halted the use of many of the 150,000 diesel-exhaust-spewing vehicles in California. Independent researchers, however, found huge overestimates in the air board's work on diesel emissions and attributed the flawed work to a faulty method of calculation - not the economic downturn.

The overestimate, which comes after another bad calculation by the air board on diesel-related deaths that made headlines in 2009, prompted the board to suspend the regulation this year while officials decided whether to weaken the rule.

Most standards created by the board have been praised as groundbreaking in the fight against pollution,but recent errors have also made the board a target for criticism.

One of the major recent problems was an air board estimate of premature deaths caused by particulate matter spewing from diesel engines. The first calculation found 18,000 deaths a year in the state had links to particulate matter. That has been revised down by nearly half.

The revision was ordered after the board scientist who oversaw that study was outed as having faked his scientific credentials.

The problem, and the revised counting method, came to light after Robert Harley, a UC Berkeley professor of environmental engineering, and a colleague at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory did their own evaluation, which was published in December in the journal Atmospheric Environment. While air board officials and other defenders of the board's science point to the economy as a major factor in the overestimates, Harley found that prior to the recession the board's estimates of nitrous oxide were too high by a factor of 4.5 and its estimate of particulate matter was off by a factor of 3.1, an extraordinarily high amount to be off scientifically.

"The difference is large enough that it changes policy," Harley said.

Harley said he has not found major discrepancies in other industrial sectors - such as trucking - where the air board has estimated pollution emissions.

Meanwhile, the estimate of premature deaths linked to diesel engine particulate matter has been downsized to 9,200 from the previous study's estimate of 18,000. Bart Croes, chief of research for the air board, noted that the board used an entirely new model developed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency that more directly links pollution with mortality and that the levels of uncertainty are much smaller under the new estimate.

 

[JasG]

UCLA fired a guy for pointing out the fraud and where the issues with the studies were.

Enstrom charged in 2008 that his colleagues exaggerated the adverse effects of particulate matter in order to justify expensive diesel fuel regulations to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Enstrom testified in the same year to the state Senate that the lead contributor to the CARB report, Hien T. Tran, paid $1,000 for his Ph.D. from a fake university, and members of a CARB panel had exceeded their mandated three-year term limits by decades.

Shortly after Enstrom revealed the misconduct, UCLA began sending him notices of termination and has refused to compensate him for more than a year’s worth of work.

“The facts of this case are astounding,” said David French, senior counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice and one of Enstrom’s lawyers. “UCLA terminated a professor after 35 years of service simply because he exposed the truth about an activist scientific agenda that was not only based in fraud, but violated California law.”

Tran was eventually suspended for 60 days, and one professor who had served on the CARB panel for 26 consecutive years was removed and later put back on the panel. John Froines, who has publicly supported diesel fuel regulations, was on a committee that voted to dismiss Enstrom.

Read more: UCLA professor of 35 years suing to keep his job after challenging environmentalist status quo | The Daily Caller

 

[Renze]

The story you posted from Forbes doesn't bring up the fact that until 2009 all over the road engines were EGR in the US. Or that Caterpillar, John Deere and Kubota are all using EGR for now and 2 of the 3 are working on SCR now and have been since the rules change. That Caterpillar, the largest truck engine maker at the time dropped out from the on road market from what I have read mainly because of the rules change. The story sounds like something the competition wrote IMO. I also go to some trade shows and people from Cat and Navistar have both told me it really screwed them because they were working within the rules at the time. That it can take years to get and engine certified and all the testing. By changing the rules that late in the game it gave a huge advantage to European builders who had been using SCR.

Thats B.S. actually. The Europeans were using EGR too untill 2009 and only some pioneers were starting to introduce SCR. NONE of todays EPA 2013 or Euro 6 or TIER 4 final engines in the over 100hp category can meet the emission stages without SCR, it simply cant be done. None go without SCR but only FPT can meet it without EGR. The other manufacturers convinced EPA it couldnt be done without SCR: Cummins and Detroit were right on time, but Dan Ustian wanted to walk alone and payd the fines for selling a non- EPA 2010 engine when time was due....
Navistar could have bought SCR systems from OEM suppliers like Faurecia, Donaldson, Huss, Bosch, many options available but they ran out of time to get a feel for it and decided to get Cummins Emission Systems expertise working for them....


Simply said, every other manufacturer knew it couldnt be done, and as the Forbes interview cites, many people within Navistar knew it couldnt be done. The others have convinced EPA so EPA changed its position, but Ustian didnt see it coming and kept walking the road abandoned by both the EPA and his competitors.... How ignorant can a CEO be ?

And yes, in Europe there was also the EGR vs SCR rivalry between manufacturers in the Euro 4 era. for Euro 6 nobody can go without SCR. Scania offered both SCR and EGR + DPF versions for Euro 4, the customer could choose (except for the 660 and 730hp V8 variants, they needed the cooling capacity for the engine alone and couldnt support additional cooled EGR load)

 

[JasG]

Thats B.S. actually. The Europeans were using EGR too untill 2009 and only some pioneers were starting to introduce SCR. NONE of todays EPA 2013 or Euro 6 or TIER 4 final engines in the over 100hp category can meet the emission stages without SCR, it simply cant be done. None go without SCR but only FPT can meet it without EGR. The other manufacturers convinced EPA it couldnt be done without SCR: Cummins and Detroit were right on time, but Dan Ustian wanted to walk alone and payd the fines for selling a non- EPA 2010 engine when time was due....
Navistar could have bought SCR systems from OEM suppliers like Faurecia, Donaldson, Huss, Bosch, many options available but they ran out of time to get a feel for it and decided to get Cummins Emission Systems expertise working for them....


Simply said, every other manufacturer knew it couldnt be done, and as the Forbes interview cites, many people within Navistar knew it couldnt be done. The others have convinced EPA so EPA changed its position, but Ustian didnt see it coming and kept walking the road abandoned by both the EPA and his competitors.... How ignorant can a CEO be ?

And yes, in Europe there was also the EGR vs SCR rivalry between manufacturers in the Euro 4 era. for Euro 6 nobody can go without SCR. Scania offered both SCR and EGR + DPF versions for Euro 4, the customer could choose (except for the 660 and 730hp V8 variants, they needed the cooling capacity for the engine alone and couldnt support additional cooled EGR load)

You say I'm full of it, and that in Europe until 2009 it was EGR. Funny by 2006 Mercedes had made 10000 trucks with SCR. Now who owns Detroit, wouldn't that be Mercedes? You site Cummins, who again has huge ties to CASE/IH which is owned by Fiat, again and OEM who already had SCR in Europe. Again like I said, it gave a huge advantage to those with ties to companies who already had it.

news: DaimlerChrysler announces 10,000th Mercedes-Benz BlueTec truck



So again please point out where I'm wrong? Again Deere and Cat went down the same road as Navistar until 2009 when the EPA changed it's mandate. Europe had no mandate as far as what to use. If it is as easy as buying system and just adding it on then why didn't Cat? Why did they drop over the road engines in 2009? Why haven't either Deere or Cat added it to off road like others? Or can it be I'm correct and it can take years of testing to get it certified?

I never said it could or couldn't be done, just facts as they are. Navistar was banking on the tech the EPA had created to prove it could be done, then in 2009 the EPA changed it's position for a whole host or reasons. That gave Caterpillar and Navistar basically zero time to meet 2010 emissions. I even posted links to support my position.

From my article above.

When EPA issued the rule in 2001, the agency said SCR technology, which is already widely used to control NOx from industrial plants and other stationary pollution sources, would not be available to meet the standard. But the 2009 guidance document approved SCR technology, amending its 2001 determination that the technology was infeasible.

 

[JasG]

Or here is another question, if it as simple as buying a system from a 3rd party and adding it. Why did both Navistar and Cat (Cat is selling a Navistar truck under it's own name) now have a Cummins engine as a option when Navistar started working on SCR over a year ago?

This is something very recent.


Cummins and Navistar Reunite - Articles - Equipment - Articles - TruckingInfo.com

In August 2008, the truck maker decided to tackle EPA's 2010 emissions rules with its proprietary EGR-only solution, the MaxxForce 13 and 15 engines, and the (soon-to-be) SCR-equipped ISX was delisted for U.S. and Canadian 2010 model-year trucks.

But Cummins and Navistar didn't exactly remain strangers. The company continued building ProStar+ trucks with EGR-only ISX and ISM engines for the Mexican market, along with other chassis configurations and various Cummins engines in markets around the globe.
Navistar announced in July 2012 that it would discontinue its EGR-only approach and bring SCR-equipped Cummins ISX engines back into databooks by the spring of 2013, reuniting the ISX and the ProStar+.

Again you can say BS but you really don't know what happened here.

 

[Renze]

Navistar bought engine technology from MAN (Germany) though MAN abandoned EGR only because it couldnt be done, Navistar wanted to get on with it.
So Navistar had just as much chances to get SCR technology from a European ally as Cummins and Detroit.

However, Navistar was not producing its own proprietary engine(s). Instead, it was proposing to re-engineer products rejected as unfit for purpose as EGR-based products by their respective, original manufacturers – MAN and Caterpillar. We were – and remain – deeply suspicious of Navistar’s claims in this regard. Its tenure in the Heavy Duty engine sector went back only to 2004, and for it to have produced market-acceptable, EPA 10 compliant engines from designs rejected by two companies with a wealth of experience within the sphere seems to be stretching the plausible to beyond breaking point.

http://www.commercialmotor.com/the-world-trucks-blog/navistar-s-spiral-of-despair-some-background

 

[JasG]

Your article shows what I have been saying including that Cummins was tied into other OEM's for help and they too were working on an EGR only solution. The MAN deal I thought was for only EGR engines, don't know anything beyond that. It wasn't like Detroit who is owned by Daimler Benz, or in joint ventures like Case-Cummins.

This is just about the EPA mandates.

Complicating the comparison – and thus the choice – for North American OEMs was the EPA’s guidance in 2001 regarding SCR, which was equivocal at best, and dismissive at worst. SCR at the time was an unknown quantity as far as road transport was concerned, and, despite the best efforts of both Daimler and Volvo, both of whom lobbied hard for the adoption of SCR technology in North America, the EPA chose not to accept it as a route to compliance for the EPA 2004 legislation.

North America chose to adopt EGR as a route to comply with the PM requirements mandated for EPA 07. Despite growing pressure on the part of Daimler and Volvo AB for the EPA to accept SCR as a route to compliance, the reality of the 2007 legislation was that it offered sufficient latitude to allow for a continuation of EGR technology, albeit at a slightly increased rate. This increase in EGR had a subsequent effect upon fuel consumption, but, unlike Europe, North America had less concerns – at the time – about fuel efficiency, and was more focused upon operational simplicity.

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying Navistar doesn't or hasn't made mistakes. I think they wanted to be a leader and were pushing hard based on the rules at the time. It didn't help that the EPA claimed they could make it work and Navistar partnered with them. What I am saying is the EPA screwed anyone who tried to follow their rules or heaven forbid get ahead of the game like Navistar did. Even Cummins did with the Dodge truck engine which until this year was EGR only, and their work up until late 2008. Then in late 2008 the EPA leaked it would allow SCR and put out their guidance document I believe in Feb of 2009.

Sad part is back when this went down, all of the engine OEM's wanted to be able to go their own way and the EPA wouldn't allow it. Caterpillar was working on different tech all together back then and had to stop. Many others including Cummins and all the others wanted SCR.