Test Drive: Cummins X12 Diesel Engine Version 2.0
By Jack Roberts
We tested our X12 in a Cascadia daycab on Interstate and two-lane highways in Western New York, near Cummins’ Jamestown plant. Photos: Jim Park
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Cummins’ new X12 engine is slated to hit the street sometime early this year, probably shortly after its formal launch in February or March. The engine was introduced in August 2016, and I had a short drive with it then around the 7-mile loop track at the Transportation Research Center in East Liberty, Ohio. It wasn’t much of an opportunity to get to know the engine, but it whet my appetite. Cummins invited me to drive the new X12 this past November on a longer real-world route, starting from the plant in Jamestown, New York, where the X12 is to be built.
The X12 has a displacement of 11.4 liters, which, according to conventional mathematical rounding principles, should have caused the engine to be named X11. However, the engine punches above its weight, and to call it X11 would have diminished some of its brightest attributes. Tipping the scales at just 2,050 pounds, it has the highest power-to-weight ratio of any heavy-duty engine from 10 liters to 16 liters in size. It’s lighter than any 11-liter block on the market (albeit subject to interpretation on how “dry weight” is determined). And its published ratings put it squarely in 13-liter to 15-liter territory for torque and horsepower.
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The unpainted parts remind us that this is a pre-production, but production-ready, engine.
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Under the hood
Development on the X12 began in 2013 in close collaboration China’s Beiqi Foton Motor Co. There it was known as the ISG. The version of the engine we’ll see here in the next month or so has been almost completely re-engineered. Cummins tells me that close to 90% of the engine saw some re-engineering to ready …Read the rest of this story
