Truck, engine makers want Navistar EPA credits revoked

Some North American truck and engine manufacturers have teamed up in an attempt to get a U.S. Court of Appeals to strip Navistar of its environmental compliance certificates granted by the Environmental Protection Agency. The engines it has received the credits for, say Navistar rivals, did not meet EPA NOx standards.

The group of manufacturers includes Daimler Trucks North America, Detroit Diesel, Mack Trucks and Volvo Group North America. They formally asked the court this week to revoke the certificates, which would make Navistar vulnerable to EPA enforcement actions and lawsuits. 

Navistar benefited, say the companies, at the expense of its competitors by receiving the certificates. Competitors, they say, spent millions of dollars in developing engines that met the tightening regulations, while Navistar simply sold non-compliant engines for a penalty of just under $2,000 per engine. 

Navistar was initially granted approval to sell the non-compliant engines, but a court last summer that the case did not meet the Administrative Procedure Act’s criteria for granting the waiver and the process should have been open to public comment.

According to the court filing from June of last year, “NCPs (nonconformance penalties) are meant to be a temporary bridge to compliance for manufacturers that have ‘made every effort to comply.’ As EPA itself has explained, NCPs are not designed to bail out manufacturers that voluntarily choose, for whatever reason, not to adopt an existing, compliant technology.”

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Overdrive sister site CCJ has more on the report. Click here to see it.