Caterpillar Finally Made A Diesel Pickup Truck, And It’s A Weird Rebadged Ford Super Duty With A Built-In Drone And AI

For the past couple of years, the Internet has been abuzz with a rumor that Caterpillar, the big yellow construction equipment company, was working on its own pickup truck. Sites that spread the rumor used terrible AI images of trucks with CAT logos on them, annoying basically everyone. Yet, at least part of the rumor was true. Caterpillar has been tinkering with a pickup truck, and now, for the first time since the rumors started, a real CAT pickup truck exists. The Cat Truck concept is a rebadged Ford Super Duty, and the people of Cat decided to soup it up with a built-in drone and AI.

This news comes to us from our friends at the Drive, and I did a double-take upon reading it. I also had to check the date to make sure it wasn’t March 32st. If your online news feeds are tuned to scoop you non-stop car news like mine are, you might have remembered that time in 2024 when every single website and YouTuber you’ve never heard of was talking about the new Caterpillar pickup truck.

All of it was so exhausting because these stories and videos were so obviously created by AI from top to bottom. Half of the time, the AIs used to produce this slop couldn’t even correctly spell “Caterpillar” and sometimes couldn’t even get “CAT” right. As for the trucks themselves, AI, or the people prompting the AIs, chose existing General Motors, Ford, Ram, or Toyota trucks and just lazily slapped CAT badges on them. Of course, since it was all AI, all of these images had a sort of uncanny look to them – like so:

Yet, clearly, the subject was clicky, and lots of people were interested in the subject. If you go on YouTube, you’ll notice that the obviously fake AI videos about the truck have hundreds of thousands of views. It’s honestly mind-blowing how many people consume entirely fake content.

But I also cannot blame these people for being so interested in this. Caterpillar is an iconic name in the heavy equipment world. Some of the largest mining trucks in the world have that familiar yellow paint scheme and “CAT” in bold white letters. CAT also makes all kinds of common construction equipment, from skid steers and wheel loaders to excavators and dozers. The company’s portfolio is so staggering that, even if you’ve never stepped onto a construction site in your life, you’ve almost certainly seen a CAT.  Team yellow even used to make highway engines, which found homes in everything from semi-tractors to school buses.

Anyway, some publications debunked the AI slop, and life continued on. Caterpillar itself never talked about making a pickup truck, and there was no reason to think CAT was working on one. The company clearly deals in heavy equipment, not towing your camper trailer. Then, something funny happened. An anonymous Caterpillar employee reached out to the Drive and confirmed that there was some sort of truck in development, and CAT was already making the engine liners for it. Allegedly, CAT was working on two options, from the Drive: A V6 for $59,000-$69,000 and a V8 starting at $89,000.

Then, the trail went cold again. Almost two years went by without a peep from Caterpillar. If you searched for the truck online, you either got articles debunking the AI or just more AI slop.

A Ford With A Cat Face

That was until this week and the huge trade show going on in Las Vegas. CONEXPO–CON/AGG 2026 is the place for equipment producers to show off their latest tech and concepts. Caterpillar is using this show to finally come out of the shadows about its rumored truck.

What’s interesting is that, in its press release, CAT seems to credit the AI slop for convincing it to make a real pickup truck. From the release:

In late 2024, something unexpected happened. The internet was buzzing with rumors about Caterpillar building a pickup truck. AI-generated images of a Cat pickup were getting everyone excited. You couldn’t look away, and we couldn’t either. Thousands of inquiries flooded in from customers, contractors, and equipment owners with one simple question: “What would a Cat Truck really be like?”

They dreamed of torque and towing power. Those were the easy parts for Caterpillar, so we went further to see how we could help them even more. We dreamed of a tech-forward system that would transform every jobsite.

So, we did something bold. We built it.

Here’s the video:

The truck that Caterpillar built isn’t nearly as ambitious as the AI guesses or previous reports suggested. In the video accompanying the press release, a jobsite manager approaches a Ford F-450 Super Duty with a 6.7-liter Power Stroke High-Output V8 diesel parked out front of a home. CAT made no effort to disguise the truck. Even the Ford badge is still on the grille, albeit whited out.

The manager touches the truck, and then it suddenly transforms into the same truck, but with a CAT face on it. Reportedly, the Ford logo still pops up in the OEM truck screens, too. When you watch the video, it appears that the rear end of the truck is largely unchanged from the base Ford.

From here, the video turns into a bit of an advertisement for Caterpillar’s AI-enabled tech. Apparently, the Cat Truck (yes, CAT capitalizes the abbreviation of its name, but not for this truck) has something called an Integrated Display Hub, which is an infotainment-style display with a built-in AI assistant, a productivity monitoring program, and a camera system that detects when workers are getting too close to dangerous equipment. The truck also has a driver fatigue monitoring system and a built-in drone launch platform. How many truck owners actually want a drone on their truck’s roof?

What’s interesting is that, immediately after listing out these techy things, Caterpillar says, “Now you can equip your own truck with this same Cat Technology, giving you complete visibility and control of your entire job site at your fingertips.”

The press release is adamant that Caterpillar actually built this truck. The release is only 464 words long, yet Caterpillar says “We built it” four different ways. Weirdly, the release also mentions the truck’s AI inspiration three times. I guess CAT really wants you to know that it took an AI slop truck and made it real.

So Many Questions

The big question is whether this is just a one-off concept truck to advertise CAT’s AI platform, or if this is Caterpillar hinting that it wants to enter the heavy-duty pickup truck market. If it’s the former, this news is sort of a nothingburger. If it’s the latter, well, that leaves us with so many questions.

What I want to know is what happened with the engines that Caterpillar was reportedly developing in 2024? CAT left the highway diesel market in 2010 following the company’s struggles with meeting more stringent emissions standards. As Transport Topics wrote in 2008, CAT’s 2007 engines suffered from performance issues and breakdowns. In 2003, Caterpillar shelled out $128 million in fines to the Environmental Protection Agency for non-compliant engines. Caterpillar was once the market leader in highway diesels, but the events of the 2000s and then the financial crisis wore away at the brand.

So then, is the Cat Truck signaling a return to the road? I suppose it could be easier for Caterpillar if it sold a pickup truck that uses a rebranded Ford 6.7 Power Stroke. But then, if the Cat Truck is just a rebadged Super Duty, what would CAT offer that Ford already doesn’t through itself or its upfitters? What market would there be for a Caterpillar pickup that’s just a rebadged something else?

With that said, it wouldn’t even be the first time that one brand’s trucks were rebadged into another brand’s. Remember Sterling Trucks? In its final years, it sold the Bullet, which was little more than a Dodge Ram HD chassis cab with a new grille.

There are so many questions here, and the easiest, perhaps most likely answer is CAT just made this truck as a publicity stunt. I have reached out to CAT to get clarification on this, and will update this story if I get any meaningful news back.

Even if this is just a publicity stunt, at least it’s a fun one. I have grown tired of seeing AI slop trucks, so seeing this one is honestly refreshing, even if it is just a Super Duty with resting CAT face. If anything, I’m not even sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the truck that Caterpillar made.

A part of me hopes that this is a teaser for a production pickup truck. Is there a market for it? Eh, maybe, maybe not. But the inner child in me wants to see a gigantic yellow diesel pickup truck with a huge Caterpillar logo on it. I already have a mental picture of one of these things hauling a camper, and I can’t help but smile.

Top graphic image: Caterpillar