The D4 is a new addition to the Caterpillar medium size dozer lineup. But it’s not a new machine. It’s the new name of the former D6K2. In the video below, we break down the reason behind the name change as well has how Cat’s new approach to naming dozers is part of a restructuring of the whole dozer lineup.
Back in 2017 Cat began a major rethinking of the way it names its machines. The feeling both within the company and among some customers was that the model names had gotten too complicated.
The D6 dozer was a perfect example of this. At one point you could opt for a D6K2, a D6N or a D6T. And all of those were very different machines. Yet they all started with “D6”. Despite the letter modifiers, most everybody referred to whichever of those machines that they had as simply a “D6”.
The trouble is that model names—especially in the context of appearing in a brochure or a lineup overview on a website— should give you a quick, at-a-glance idea of how one machine compares to another within that lineup. Having multiple machines with different identities but essentially the same name, just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
So, three years ago Cat started cleaning things up by removing the alphabet soup that had begun to accumulate within its model names. Almost two years ago, the change came to Cat’s medium size dozer lineup with the introduction of the next generation D6 and D6 XE, the new D5 and the new D7.
