Cummins Confidential Special : Since We’ve Been Gone – Diesel Kings, Parts Peddlers And Borrowed Heroes

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While TCAP took a breath, Cummins did what Cummins does best. It filled the silence with diesel worship, parts catalogues and people stories polished to a corporate shine. In ten days you got the full house: data centre panic porn, a Meritor upsell sermon, a diesel technician fairy tale and another neatly staged military-to-Cummins redemption arc.

We might have been quiet. They were busy stuffing the newsfeed. Time to clean the windscreen.

Data Centre Diesel – Mandatory Uptime, Optional Planet

The data centre piece starts like a Hollywood trailer for Armageddon. Fast paced, high stakes, downtime never an option, the usual breathless rubbish. Then they wheel out the hero – a dedicated Cummins team at every stage, from sales to service, holding your hand while the servers hum and the air turns to soup.

They talk about hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, like nature is the only thug in the room. The real villain is right there in their own paragraph: data centres already chewing through around five per cent of US electricity and climbing. That should read like an emergency. Instead it is treated as a sales opportunity.

So out comes the green seasoning. Advanced low emission diesel, hydrogen somewhere over the rainbow, battery storage on the horizon. Sustainability goals name-checked just long enough to tick the ESG box.

Then Jim drops the quiet part out loud. “For the foreseeable future, I think diesel is king”.

There it is. The crown. Everything before that line is choreography. Everything after is damage control. Hydrogen, nuclear, batteries – all filed under maybe in ten years. The cash today is in big metal boxes full of diesel lined up behind the internet like chimneys behind a casino.

They call it backup. The planet calls it a tab.

Driveline Gospel – The Unsung Hero Of Never Letting Anything Rest

Next, Cummins turns to the driveline and writes it up like an obituary for a fallen comrade. Unsung hero. Always working hard. Silent backbone of your vehicle. In reality it is an excuse to sell you Meritor parts with a side of fear.

Winter becomes a character – ice, salt, corrosion, seals shrinking, bearings choking on grit. Your truck starts making noises and suddenly you are one clunk away from ruin unless you genuflect to genuine Meritor components.

They roll out the benefits like a televangelist reading from a shopping list. Restored performance, increased uptime, faster serviceability, reliable quality, cost savings over time. All true on a narrow, mechanical level and completely dishonest on the bigger one.

Because the whole point of this “unsung hero” is not safety or efficiency. It is to keep the freight hamster wheel spinning. Every rebuilt shaft and shiny U-joint is another offering to a system that treats roads like conveyor belts and the atmosphere like a bin bag.

Uptime is sacred. The lungs on either side of the motorway are not. They do not say that bit in the bullet points.

Diesel Tech Dream – Come For The Pride, Stay For The Fumes

Then we get the “day in the life” of a diesel technician. It reads like something left on the chairs at a school careers evening. Variety, problem solving, steady hours, the joy of keeping industries moving.

They list the tasks – inspections, diagnostics, repairs, emissions checks. They list the skills – mechanical aptitude, problem solving, attention to detail, communication. All technically true and emotionally hollow.

What you do not see is the real weight of the job. The pressure when you are the one who knows the brakes are borderline but the truck has to roll. The feeling when a management target silently stands behind every “safety” decision. The way burnout looks when you have been the one crawling under equipment in every season while the same company boasts about record returns and “people first” culture.

Cummins talks about supporting techs with training and growth programmes, which will sound familiar to anyone who has seen how this company treats workers once they are no longer useful to the brand story. Pride exists – in the techs, not the logo. Cummins is more than happy to borrow it.

SkillBridge Spin – From Search And Rescue To Brand Rescue

Finally, because one Remembrance-adjacent stunt apparently was not enough, we get Christian, the Coast Guard machinery tech turned Cummins employee through the SkillBridge programme.

On the surface it is wholesome. Mission capable vessels, search and rescue assets, a young family, a decision to change careers. Cummins appears as the kindly giant with an “amiable reputation”, offering structure, training and a path to engineering greatness.

Underneath, it is just a different unit in the same propaganda factory.

Service is treated like a raw material they can refine into PR. Christian’s discipline and experience are quietly repackaged as “pride in employer”. The SkillBridge scheme, which should exist to give military people genuine options, becomes a conveyor belt from search and rescue to brand rescue.

His advice to others – do not rely on rank, focus on education, do not be lazy – is solid, human, hard-won. Cummins wraps that wisdom round its own name like a scarf. The message is not “you built this”. It is “look what we did for him”.

After your November 11th piece, this lands exactly as you said – they did not honour, they marketed. Again.

Since We’ve Been Gone – The Full House On One Bingo Card

Step back and lay these four pieces on the table and the pattern is screaming.

  • Data centres: diesel crowned king, transition pushed to later.
  • Drivelines: parts as salvation, uptime as religion, emissions as background noise.
  • Technicians: workers turned into brochure characters to humanise a machine that burns them out.
  • Veterans: lived experience wired straight into the PR grid as proof that Cummins is kind.

Every story is structured to do one thing – make the current business model look inevitable, noble and permanent. Planet creaking under data load. Roads choked with freight. Workers sweating under someone else’s share price. People who actually served their country repurposed as moral insulation for a diesel multinational.

This is what Cummins pumps out when it thinks no one is watching. TCAP blinked. Cummins filled the gap with adverts dressed as stories. Consider this your delayed programming note. We saw it. We kept the receipts. We are done being quiet.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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