Trucking Engineers up to the Challenge
Rolf Lockwood
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Rolf Lockwood
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Trucking engenders passion, and I see it in the engineers you depend on, who seem able to beat just about any challenge that comes along. They slide the big lever into gear and they go. I’m especially impressed by those who design engines.
I admire their ingenuity and their inventiveness greatly. There are good ones and bad ones, I suppose, and we’ve all known engines that weren’t exactly impressive. But collectively, the engineers who deliver your horses are a good bunch. And some of them are simply brilliant.
That’s a good thing, given the Environmental Protection Agency’s continuing insistence that diesel engines get cleaner and cleaner and then cleaner again. And now, for your benefit, more fuel-efficient as well. (The EPA should have started there, in my opinion, but that’s a different column.)
Not to say we should have been free to pollute, but you don’t have to be a tree-hugger to realize that something had to be done.
My first taste of that need was in 1972 when I lived in London, England, for a couple of years. With thousands of diesel taxis, buses, and trucks running around the city, not to mention a zillion cars and a lot of household and industrial smokestacks burning coal, the air was truly awful.
And how about California? Every year through the 1980s and early 1990s I used to go to Anaheim, just south of Los Angeles, for a truck show. But the air was so bad — literally brown — that it was several years before I realized there should be mountains visible immediately to the east. I just couldn’t see them through the haze until one unusually clear day. I was astonished.
London and southern California were worst cases, sure, but they showed us just how bad things could get if we didn’t …Read the rest of this story
