August 12, 2009 Vol. 5, No. 17

No choice really but to start with the recent revelation that Navistar will offer selective catalytic reduction (SCR) emissions control on its engines after all. Well, sort of. It’s available on a few engines made by its subsidiary in Brazil, MWM International, to meet the Euro IV standard that’s about to be applied there.

MWM, based in Sao Paulo, builds engines from 2.5 to 9.3 liters for essentially every market in the vehicular, agriculture, industrial and marine segments. It does not build trucks (www.mwm-international.com.br/).

My good friend Oliver Dixon first noted this apparent contradiction – Navistar being OK with SCR in South America but very vocally against it in the northern half of our hemisphere – and wrote about it in his entertaining World Trucks Blog (very much worth a look at www.roadtransport.com/blogs/world-trucks-blog/) a couple of weeks ago. My colleague Marco Beghetto followed up with a call to Navistar headquarters in Warrenville, Illinois this week.

Spokesman Roy Wiley confirmed that MWM would indeed build SCR engines in Brazil. He said they’re being made at the request of Volkswagen Truck and Bus, Navistar’s largest South American customer, in meeting the Euro IV emissions standards Brazil has adopted. Euro IV is well behind our EPA 2007 standard, by the way.

“Regulations, conditions, and environmental issues are different in Brazil and other parts of the world,” he said. “We’re a big supplier to Volkswagen and so we work with them.”