Valhalla Rising With Volvo Trucks

By Jack Roberts

A glimpse of Volvo’s work on future transportation technology is apparent in this model of an autonomous concept truck on display at the company’s Customer Center in Dublin, VA. Photo: Jack Roberts

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If I could take a time machine and travel back to visit my ancestors running around in Wales, in the British Isles, a thousand or so years ago, at some point I suspect they would get around to telling me what a major buzzkill it was to see a bunch of Scandinavians – Vikings, they would have called them – showing up on their doorstep.

Vikings, they would no doubt warn me, are violent, reckless, boastful braggarts, always going on about their great deeds in their Sagas, and primarily interested in burning, pillaging and stealing anything they could get their hands on.

The facts are much more nuanced, of course. Given my family history, I seriously doubt my forbearers were up to much good themselves back then, and probably didn’t have a whole lot of room to talk. But they would still be aghast to learn that historians today consider the Viking’s contribution to world history to be far more important than the occasional ransacked village. And despite the contemporary charges of heathenism and debauchery, the Norsemen were also skilled engineers whose long boats were wonders of the age.

Whatever anybody thinks about the Vikings today, it does seem they did get all the violence and boasting out of their system after terrorizing my ancestors all those years ago. The Scandinavians today are quiet, well-mannered and modest about their accomplishments.

If you visit Volvo Trucks, either here in the States, or in Europe, you see that reserved Swedish pragmatism on display as well. The engineering heritage pioneered a millennia ago by their ancestors is very much alive and well in the cutting edge …Read the rest of this story

Source:: http://www.truckinginfo.com/blog/truck-tech/story/2018/03/valhalla-rising.aspx