Cummins announced today that the company settled with the U.S. Justice Department and the State of California. Cummins will pay a $1.675 Billion fine to settle claims that it violated the Clean Air Act by installing emissions defeat devices on hundreds of thousands of turbo-diesel engines. This settlement includes 660,000 engines in Ram 2500 and 3500 HD pickup trucks that were built between 2013 and 2019, and 330,000 additional engines in vehicles in Ram 2500 and 3500 HD trucks built between 2019 and 2023.
Altogether, this can affect 960,000 Ram HD pickup trucks built between 2013 and 2023. This is a huge settlement and a huge number of potentially affected trucks. This is pretty much all we know. The nature of the defeat devices is undisclosed. These can be software-based, hardware-based, or both.
Here is the U.S. Department of Justice statement.
Here is the Cummins Inc statement.
How will this affect the owners of these 960,000 pickup trucks? We do not know the full extent of this. Cummins Inc. says that the company has already begun executing recalls related to this that involve 2013-2019 Ram pickup trucks. There may be more recalls coming at a later date. There may be owner compensation or a buy-back program. These details are still unknown.
This is very important breaking news that comes out late on a Friday afternoon, right before a Christmas weekend holiday.
