Caterpillar is introducing a new generation of small wheel loaders, including the Cat 926, 930, and 938 models, which provide a wide range of innovative features and technologies to enhance safety, simplify operation, and lower overall lifecycle costs. These loaders are designed to suit specific industries and applications, such as agriculture, waste, forestry, aggregate, and snow removal. The company places a strong emphasis on safety and technology, with a range of new safety features and simplified technology aimed at ensuring ease of operation for new equipment operators.

"The small wheel loader portfolio, they are the Swiss Army knife of machines, and our challenge is to be able to configure them for success in a huge variety of applications,” said Joel Grimes, Cat wheel loader global product and application expert.

The new loaders offer industry-specific configurations targeted to agriculture, waste, forestry, aggregate and snow removal applications.

"Of course, you can buy them from us configured specific to an industry, specific to an application, but you can also as a dealer-installed kit in some cases, do it yourself or reconfigure them through the aftermarket space," he said. 

Regardless of the application, Grimes said one of the questions he likes to ask globally is, what is one of the challenges in revenue growth? Safety universally comes up the most.

“Caterpillar is a very safety-focused company. Our dealers are very safety focused and our customers expect that we help to lead in this space,” Grimes said, noting that the new small wheel loaders offer new safety innovations, some standard and some optional.

Second to safety is the technology and general operation of the machine.

“One of the things we aspired to do with this next generation of small wheel loaders is making technology simple,” Grimes said. “On this size product, we know that the operator probably got promoted from a shovel, and it's one of the first machines they may be running. We want to make sure they get the most out of it without needing to know every button, every mode and everything to set.”

Lastly, he said, Cat’s benchmark aspiration is to have the lowest total lifecycle cost of a machine. Grimes said the next-generation 926-, 930- and 938-wheel loaders further evolve that concept