International bowed out of the medium duty vocational segment when it mothballed its TerraStar model in 2015, but the Lisle, Illinois truck maker is taking a curtain call nearly 4 years later with a new Class 4/5 truck.
The final piece of International’s completely revamped truck lineup, the CV Series is not a consumer-grade vehicle and International says it was not designed for “average joes.”
This week, I took a collection of CVs for a spin around Chicago’s Soldier Field – home of Da Bears – to get a feel for just how International plans to separate itself from the likes of Ford and its Super Duty and Ram’s 4500/5500 pickups.
Part of that plan doesn’t have anything to do with the truck itself. International says it will lean heavily on the expertise of its dealership network, banking on the industry’s largest commercial dealer network and more than 7,600 service bays.
“[Commercial truck] customers don’t want to do business with dealers who dabble in commercial trucks,” says Navistar’s President of Truck and Parts Michael Cancelliere. “They want a true commercial partner that will take their business from start up to scale up.”
