Why New Holland's Smallest Mini Excavators Run Kubota and Yanmar Engines, Not FPT

Pop the engine cover on a New Holland E12D or E60D mini excavator and you won't find an FPT nameplate on the block — the in-house diesel brand that powers New Holland's own B110D backhoe loader and its T5 agricultural tractors. Open one up and you'll find a Kubota. Open the E19D specifically and you'll find a Yanmar instead. For a manufacturer whose parent company, CNH Industrial, builds its own global engine business, sourcing four of five new D-Series mini excavator engines from outside suppliers isn't an oversight or a cost-cutting shortcut on the cheap end of the lineup. It's a deliberate call, and understanding why tells you something real about what these machines cost to own, not just what they cost to finance.

Five New Engines, Two Outside Suppliers

New Holland's five newest D-Series mini excavators, introduced at ConExpo-Con/Agg 2026 and now the backbone of a nine-model diesel-and-electric lineup, split cleanly by engine source. The E12D runs a Kubota D722 rated 11.8 horsepower. The E30D and E38D both run Kubota diesels rated 24.4 horsepower, despite the roughly two-ton spread in operating weight between them. The E60D, the biggest of the five and the flagship of the new group, runs a Kubota V2607-CR-T rated 59.4 horsepower. Only the E19D breaks the Kubota pattern, running an 18.4-horsepower Yanmar. Not one of the five carries an FPT badge — the diesel brand CNH Industrial builds specifically to power its own construction and agricultural equipment, and the same brand under the hood of New Holland's larger machines.

Why FPT Skips the Small End of the Lineup

That's a real contrast with the rest of New Holland's current construction lineup. The B110D loader backhoe, the larger of New Holland's two current backhoe models, runs an FPT F5 3.4-liter four-cylinder rated 110 gross horsepower — described on New Holland's own product page as "the same unit proven on the D Series loader backhoes as it is on mighty New Holland T5 tractors." That's CNH running one engine platform across both its construction and agricultural brands at genuine scale, with the parts commonality and volume pricing that comes with it. It's a real advantage once a machine crosses into the horsepower range where CNH's own engine plants are already tooled up and running.

Mini excavators under roughly 25 horsepower, and the 25-to-74-horsepower tier just above them, are a different market. Kubota alone has built and sold more small-displacement diesels in that range than nearly any other manufacturer on earth, supplying its own compact equipment lineup and a long list of outside brands well beyond New Holland. Building a competitive proprietary engine at that scale, for the comparatively small number of units CNH would need each year, simply doesn't pencil out. So on the D-Series' five smallest and newest models, New Holland buys in instead of building — the same logic that has other major compact-equipment brands running Kubota or Yanmar power under their own sheet metal.

There's a practical upside to that sourcing decision beyond the engine itself: Kubota parts and service are available through an enormous independent dealer and small-engine-shop network across the country, not just through New Holland's own dealer channel. A contractor running one of these mini excavators in a rural area, or simply closer to a Kubota tractor dealer than a New Holland construction dealer, isn't stuck waiting on a single supply chain for a filter or a starter. That's a real uptime advantage on top of the maintenance simplicity the smaller engine already provides.

What Staying Under 75 Horsepower Actually Buys You

The horsepower ceiling on these five engines isn't incidental. It keeps every one of them under the roughly 75-horsepower line where EPA Tier 4 Final compliance requires a full selective catalytic reduction system and diesel exhaust fluid. Engines above that line, like the B110D's 110-horsepower FPT F5, need a complete SCR package: a DEF tank, dosing lines, an injector, and an aftertreatment module the operator has to keep filled and functioning correctly. Engines below it, including all five of these new mini excavators, hit the same emissions targets a simpler way — electronically controlled common-rail fuel injection paired with a diesel oxidation catalyst, a passive device with no fluid to buy, no second tank to remember to fill, and no risk of the engine derating itself because DEF ran dry on a Friday afternoon with no supply run possible before Monday.

That difference shows up directly in what a mini excavator costs to own over its working life. No DEF tank means no DEF to purchase and store. No SCR catalyst means one less electronically monitored aftertreatment system that can fault, throw a code, and put the machine down mid-job. And on machines this size, routine maintenance really is close to just fluids, filters, and greasing pins — Kubota's and Yanmar's small industrial diesels are built and proven across a huge global installed base to run for tens of thousands of hours between any major internal work.

None of that costs an operator usable power for the class. Manufacturers building sub-75-horsepower Tier 4 Final diesels lean on electronic common-rail control to hold torque flatter across the working rpm range than older, mechanically injected engines ever managed — so an operator moving onto one of these from a slightly larger DEF-equipped machine typically doesn't feel a meaningful gap in day-to-day digging and lifting performance, even where the spec sheet shows a lower peak horsepower number.

That parts-availability picture matters even more once you consider where mini excavators actually rack up hours. Landscaping and irrigation crews, utility locate-and-repair outfits, and demolition subs working occupied buildings tend to run lean maintenance operations without a dedicated shop — for them, a five-minute filter swap sourced from whichever dealer is closest beats a special order from a single brand's parts counter every time.

Who This Actually Matters For

This isn't an abstract engineering footnote — it changes which contractors should be looking hardest at a D-Series mini excavator in the first place. A utility contractor running daily trenching and repair calls, a landscaper digging footings and irrigation runs job after job, a demolition sub doing interior strip-out work in tight, occupied spaces — all of these crews put real cumulative hours on a small excavator, and all of them genuinely benefit from a machine with one less fluid system to babysit between jobs and one less thing that can strand a crew mid-week. Compare that against a full-size excavator running full SCR, where the added DEF-system complexity is simply the accepted cost of the horsepower and digging force the job actually requires. New Holland's electric options — the E25X electric mini excavator and the C314X electric mini track loader — sidestep this whole diesel-emissions conversation entirely, running on battery power instead, for crews working noise- or emissions-restricted sites.

That's also exactly the class of machine that gets rented over and over by contractors who assume a mini excavator is too small a purchase to bother financing. It isn't. A rental dollar spent on an E30D or E60D for a two-week job is a dollar that's gone permanently — no equity built, no asset on your balance sheet, and you're back at the rental counter the next time a comparable job lands on your desk, paying the markup all over again. Financing the machine instead means you own the asset by the time your next project needs it, earning for you on every job in between rather than sitting on someone else's rental lot. BFC structures equipment financing specifically so a growing utility, landscaping, or demolition contractor isn't forced to choose between adding a mini excavator to the fleet and keeping cash available for the job that's already running.

Ready to add a New Holland mini excavator — or any equipment on our approved manufacturer list — to your fleet? Visit our home page, apply for equipment financing directly, browse current equipment for sale, or subscribe to get new posts like this.