Cummins turns up at Busworld Europe 2025 doing its usual party trick – roll out a multi-energy buffet, mumble “decarbonisation pathway” a dozen times, and hope nobody notices the big diesel elephant in the hall doing shots at the bar.
On the stand you get the full Cummins tarot deck:
– LFP batteries coming “soon”
– Hydrogen engines pitched as “niche but promising”
– Natural gas sold as a “bridge”
– And diesel – still three quarters of the show, just sprayed with Euro VI / Euro VII holy water and called progress
This is not a revolution. It is the same old engine empire with a zero-emission cosplay wing bolted on the side, like a brothel opening a mindfulness room and calling itself a wellness retreat.
Let’s unspin the sermon.
Accelera’s LFP Batteries – Net Zero, Now On Pre-Order For 2028
Accelera by Cummins fronts up with its newest generation of lithium iron phosphate packs.
We are told:
- Older LFP around 145 Wh/kg
- New Cummins LFP around 165 Wh/kg, “approaching NMC”
- Safer, longer cycle life, better cost, higher C-rates
- Cell-to-pack and cell-to-chassis, under-floor pack at 140 mm, passenger seats bolted straight on
- European production for the one-tier pack “introduced in 2028”
- 3T variant in North America in 2027
So in 2025, at a show full of buses you can actually buy, Cummins is selling you a PowerPoint battery that might turn up in European city fleets in 2028, if the stars align and management do not wander off into the next diesel crisis.
The chemistry is fine. LFP makes sense for buses. The way they talk about it is pure Cummins theatre:
- Everything is “advanced”
- Rivals are painted as passenger-car dabblers
- Their cells are “specifically designed” for commercial duty cycles
- Manufacturing is pitched as a triumph of USMCA and Buy America compliance
It is less climate urgency and more trade-policy cosplay dressed up as green heroics.
Ask who the European customers are and it snaps straight into witness protection mode – they are “unable to disclose specific customer names at this time”. Nothing screams mature product like no named operators and a launch date three years out.
Cell-To-Chassis – Structural Pack Or Structural Headache
The sales line is simple. The pack becomes part of the chassis, load-bearing, seats on top, no wasted space. In engineering terms, interesting. In Cummins terms, another future-tense promise parked safely in 2027–2028 while they keep pushing combustion hard in the present.
The unsaid bit – when your pack is the chassis, any design fuck-up, thermal event or recall is no longer a component swap. It is a structural nightmare. Lovely for total cost-of-ownership slides, less lovely when some poor operator is left with a bus-shaped paperweight because the “structural energy storage solution” aged like milk instead of like steel.
Natural Gas – The Bridge Fuel That Never Reaches The Other Side
Then we get the comfort food.
From their own numbers:
- Gas now around 20–25 percent of bus sales
- Diesel still about 75 percent
- A few years ago, gas was 10–15 percent
- They expect gas demand to stay strong “at least until the Euro 7 stage”
The spin is that natural gas is a bridge technology that helps operators decarbonise on a wheel-to-wheels basis, especially when you sprinkle renewable natural gas on top.
Translation – they have found a way to keep combustion alive, call it a bridge, and flog it for another decade.
RNG is great where it actually exists in real volumes at sane prices without creative carbon bookkeeping. In most places it does not. That does not stop Cummins selling gas engines like indulgence tokens – absolution now, infrastructure later.
Notice what is missing – any hard breakdown of how much of that growing gas fleet is really on RNG and how much is just plain fossil methane dressed up as progress.
Diesel – Three Quarters Of Sales, Wrapped In Euro-Standard Incense
The money quote is simple enough – diesel still represents the majority of their sales in the bus segment, roughly 75 percent, and they reckon demand will remain solid at least until Euro 7.
So while the stand screams multi-energy future, the actual order book still looks like 2015 with better graphics.
They roll out a Euro VI version of the X10 HELM platform, originally pitched as a Euro 7 engine, now chopped back because the Euro 7 timeline has softened. Same 10-litre base, up to 454 horsepower and 2,200 Nm, with Euro 7 tweaks promised later.
Classic Cummins manoeuvre:
- Complain loudly about ambitious regulation
- Enjoy the delay or dilution
- Launch an “interim” fossil workhorse and call it customer focus
Euro VI X10 is not a climate solution. It is a regulatory comfort blanket – a way of telling operators they can keep burning diesel for years and still feel modern because the label says Euro VI today and Euro 7 tomorrow.
Hydrogen ICE – Combustion In Witness Protection
Because it is 2025 and you are not allowed into a trade fair without saying “hydrogen” at least twice, we get the B6.7H – a 6.7-litre hydrogen internal combustion engine pushing about 290 horsepower and 1,200 Nm. Built in Jamshedpur for Tata field trials, with a Europe demonstrator tied to Anadolu Isuzu’s Kendo.
Hydrogen ICE is clever engineering. It is also Cummins doing what Cummins always does – finding a way to keep the engine division centre-stage while pretending it has joined the zero-emission choir.
Even their own man concedes the obvious – refuelling infrastructure is limited, investment costs are high, and hydrogen ICE will be niche for now.
So why is it in the window? Because hydrogen ICE lets them talk about “hydrogen” while keeping pistons, crankshafts and the whole combustion habit alive. It is combustion in witness protection – same addiction, new identity card.
The Multi-Energy Fairy Tale
The party line is that the bus market moves at different speeds, so you need everything – diesel, gas, hybrid, battery, hydrogen. It sounds grown-up, pragmatic, reasonable.
Look at the weightings:
- Diesel around 75 percent of sales
- Gas 20–25 percent
- Actual zero-emission a sliver, mostly future-dated and fenced in by caveats about cost and infrastructure
The real hierarchy is:
- Combustion that exists now and makes serious money
- Gas combustion that polls a bit better
- Hydrogen combustion to keep the engine pipeline interesting
- Batteries that turn up in 2027–2028 if nothing slips
That is not a strategy for a climate emergency. It is a managed decline of fossil dependence dressed in the language of “choice” and “pathways”.
If your house is on fire, Cummins’ pitch is basically – we will keep selling you petrol heaters because they are proven, a gas heater as a bridge, and here is a very glossy brochure for a sprinkler system we might install in three years if procurement goes well.
Busworld As Confessional – All Smoke, No Absolution
Busworld 2025 wants you to see Cummins as a thoughtful guide through a complex transition.
Strip the PR and what you actually have is:
- Zero-emission tech with realistic availability pushed to 2027–2028
- No named European fleets for the new LFP packs
- A frank admission that diesel still dominates and will do so into Euro 7
- Natural gas rebadged as a climate bridge rather than a way to sweat combustion assets
- Hydrogen ICE used to keep the engine division plugged into tomorrow’s buzzwords
The stand looks like 2035. The sales ledger still looks like last decade.
Until those numbers flip – until zero-emission is the default and combustion genuinely becomes the niche – all this “multi-energy strategy” talk is just another way of saying they are going to milk fossil tech for as long as regulators and operators let them.
Cummins is not confused. It knows exactly what it is doing. The question is how long the trade press will keep printing this stuff as progress instead of what it actually is – a bus-shaped holding pattern for a diesel company that cannot kick its own habit. For as long as it is paid to, is the suggestion.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
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