Daylight saving finished here last weekend which is a clear message that summer has finished.  The way the weather has been this year many locals are wondering whether summer ever started.  The temperatures are still quite mild – low 20s (that’s Celsius for the North American) but it hasn’t been consistently settled or sunny all summer – just like the world economy.

A major event that we have had here recently is that on March 25^th at 5am the give way rules changed.  Interestingly for us older people they have changed back to being substantially the same as what they were before the previous change to the rules which occurred in 1977.   The rules that have just been superseded were based on a philosophy that the vehicle with the most difficult turn (most potential conflicts) should have the right of way.  Although this sounds good in theory it did not work that well in practice.  The information sheet for the current changes notes that when the previous changes were introduced the casualty crash rate at intersections increased by 2.5% in the next three years.  Nevertheless these rules have remained in place for over 34 years.  I remember many years ago at a conference having a discussion about the rules with a very senior Ministry of Transport official.  I told him the rules were stupid and he tried to convince me they were logical and rational.  I subsequently found out that he was the author of the rules.

One of the interesting things about the new rules is how the transport agency responsible for them handled the advertising and information programme.  Although the changes were signalled quite some time ago, the agency did not commence its advertising campaign to inform motorists of the pending changes until 10 days before the change.  They then undertook an intensive media information campaign which lasted until a week after the change.   This approach was criticised by a number of self-proclaimed “road safety experts” who predicted chaos.  One of the newspapers quoted a panelbeater as saying he expected a lot of extra work.  I am not sure how fixing crashed vehicles makes you an expert on road safety.  Since the change it has all gone quiet.  It is too soon for any data analysis but it does not appear that there been any dramatic increase in intersection crashes.  From my own driving experience people appear to have adapted very well.  The transport agency’s media strategy of going for a short but intensive programme of advertising rather than a longer less intensive approach seems to me to have been effective although as yet I have no hard evidence.

Drive safely.

Regards,

John de Pont

IFRTT vice President Asia-Pacific

February 1, 2012

In the style of our esteemed college Anders Lundström, I will open this newsletter with a brief discussion on weather.  North America is experiencing its mildest winter in decades at the same time that Central and Eastern Europe are experiencing their coldest.  Here in Ann Arbor the majority of daytime temperatures during January have been well above freezing as we end the month at + 12 deg C.  Heating oil reserves in the U.S are at their highest for this time of year and it is estimated that our national storage capacity will be reached by mid-summer.  It is a safe bet that that diesel exports from the U.S. will be up this year.  I am always amazed how Mother Nature works – taunting part of the world with warmth and hammering the other with cold.  Being from a northern country I love the cold and snow and when I look out my window in February and see only grass I feel like I am missing something.

Irrespective of the weather Detroit is a great place to be this time of year.   Every January it hosts the North American International Auto Show.  It was brilliant this year with all the major companies putting on great displays.  Ford continues to impress with their integration of human interface systems that are available even in their basic models.  The highlight of the show for me was Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull racing Formula One car on display at the Infinity booth.  The car was designed by the world’s leading race car designer Adrian Newey, and it represents the pinnacle of the race car industry having won the championship two years in a row.  I was transfixed by this vehicle and made a second trip to the auto show specifically to spend time with this glorious machine.

Transportation Research Board (TRB) had its 91^st Annual Conference January 22 to January 26 attracting some 11,000 delegates.  There were many great papers presented on the subject of heavy trucks.  The trucking Industry Research session had a wide verity of papers including one on Europe’s Freight Transportation Policy, several on freight efficiency, road pricing, truck diversion routing and tolling.  There was a session on the Impacts of Truck Size and Weighty Policy Changes.  Our Australian colleagues Matthieu Berni, and Rob Di Cristoforo talked about “Connecting Australia with Modular B-Trains.  Laszlo Bruza and Russell Hoelzl spoke on the “Development of Innovative Road Transport Solutions for Container transport in South Queensland, Australia”.  I gave a talk on “Analysis of U.S. Truck Size and Weight Policy in Relation to Vehicle Mass.  One great surprise was that TRB’s Patricia Waller Award (best Safety System User Paper) went to UMTRI researchers Daniel Blower, Paul Green and some guy by the name of Woodrooffe.  This was a great surprise to us as it is the first time that a paper on heavy truck safety has won this honor.

UMTRI has been awarded a $14.9 million contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to conduct a safety pilot model deployment of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) safety applications in Ann Arbor, MI.  The 30-month program will establish a real world, multimodal test site in Ann Arbor for enabling wireless communications among vehicles and roadside equipment for use in generating data to enable safety applications. Passenger cars, commercial trucks, and transit buses will be included that are equipped with a mix of integrated, retrofit, and aftermarket V2V and V2I-based safety systems, a technology that could prevent thousands of crashes.  The data generated and archived as part of the model deployment will be used for estimating safety benefits in support of future policy decisions by the USDOT, as well as for use by the broader transportation industry in developing additional safety, mobility, and environmental applications utilizing wireless technologies. The testing phase will last twelve (12) months, and include approximately 2,850 vehicles.

Our truck research at UMTRI remains focused on the effectiveness of future crash avoidance technologies.  We have recently completed a study for NHTSA on the effects of stability control systems for straight trucks and Motorcoaches and we are in the final stages of a study on the effectiveness of collision mitigation braking systems, which includes forward collision warning.

Yesterday I attended the Automotive Megatrends USA 2012 conference which focused on safety, connectivity and electrification.  I am pleased to report that both active and passive safety continue to bring great promise in reducing injuries and fatalities.  The work on airbags is particularly noteworthy as the new generation “front center” airbags are now being designed to position and immobilize drivers during the crash events.  I can see great opportunities for heavy truck applications of this technology.

And another interesting development was reported in Automotive News today – Auto Hacking!  Yes the vulnerabilities of Microsoft Windows have migrated to the automotive sector – can trucks be far behind?  Quotes of interest from the article follow.

“What increasingly worries scientists is that entertainment computers could be manipulated to tell the safety computers what to do.”

“There clearly is vulnerability,” said Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va. “All these electronics we’re bringing into cars seem to exacerbate that.”

“Car thieves could exploit security weaknesses to remotely open and start a car, or a spy could listen to conversations inside a car”, Stefan Savage, a University of California-San Diego computer science professor, said in a telephone interview. He co-authored a paper last year after discovering ways to hack into cars.”

The future for highway safety has never been brighter and it is clear that the solutions will be limited by society’s willingness to relinquish control of the vehicle to new technologies rather than the technologies themselves.  One of the more sobering predictions was given by Adrian Lund who pointed out that despite new regulations requiring ESC on all light vehicles from 2012 onward, the technology we will not reach 90% penetration until 2030.  We clearly need to be thinking long term.

John Woodrooffe

IFRTT Vice-President: North America

Christmas in the southern hemisphere is associated with summer holidays, which in South Africa means that from the beginning of December (when schools close) hundreds of thousands of people head for the coast and the beaches or to visit their families, particularly from the densely populated Johannesburg-Pretoria area.  Unfortunately, this also brings serious fatal crashes, particularly when passenger vehicles are involved. Almost two weeks ago I drove from Pretoria to Durban (650 km) with my two teenage children to visit their Grandma. We left at 05:45 and I heard on the 06:00 news that there had been a serious crash at 02:00 on the Jhb-Durban highway involving a truck and a mini-bus taxi. The driver of the taxi had either fallen asleep or lost concentration for some seconds, resulting in the taxi crossing the painted median into the two oncoming lanes. The taxi was certified to carry 23 passengers, but at the time was loaded with 35 passengers.  The result of the head-on collision was 30 fatalities plus serious injuries.  We passed the scene of the crash at around 9:00 and I was overcome with emotion regarding this tragedy and senseless waste of life.

During the next few days, various thoughts went through my mind relating to this crash. One was a renewed sense of purpose in terms of various projects in which I am involved. One such project is the Road Transport Management System accreditation scheme, which promotes the adoption of standards by transport operators, consignors & consignees relating to vehicle loading, maintenance and driver wellness & training.  There are now approximately 1 500 trucks participating in the RTMS scheme in South Africa, and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) is planning to run a pilot project on the North-South Corridor involving Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa.  Also, there is the performance-based standards project, which results in heavy vehicles that are dynamically more stable when undertaking various manoeuvres. 36 “Smart Truck” demonstration vehicles are currently in operation and this number should have doubled by the end of 2012.

I also experienced a sense of pride in being involved in the IFRTT, an organisation that has members and affiliates all over the world who are actively involved in improving, amongst others, the safety of vehicles, trucks in particular. To those of you that are involved in such road or vehicle safety work: keep it up.  The need out there, particularly in developing countries where road fatalities are generally orders of magnitude greater than in the developed world, is great.

70 abstracts have been received for the HVTT12 conference in Stockholm in September 2012.  These will be allocated to members of the scientific committee early in the New Year for review, so authors can expect their reviewed abstracts towards during February.

DIS (Draft International Standard)/ISO 39001: Road Traffic Safety Management Systems has been approved by the ISO/PC 241 committee and the comments received will be addressed at the next meeting from 20 to 24 February in Johannesburg.

I wish you and your families and loved ones a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and everything of the best for 2012. And please drive safely and responsibly.

Paul Nordengen

IFRTT President

As you northerners now enter your winter we are approaching summer.  Here Christmas is a time for summer holidays, going to beach and eating barbecued food outside with a beer.  However, many, if not most, of us trace at least some of our ethnic origins back to Europe and so we still have Santa Claus travelling in a sled towed by reindeer – someone may like to calculate his carbon footprint.

Our colleagues in Sweden are now well underway with the preparations for HVTT12 which will be held in Stockholm from September 16 – 19 next year.  The deadline for extended abstracts has been extended to Dec 1^st, 2011 so you have just under two weeks to prepare your submission.  Full details on the conference and the abstract submission process can be found at the conference web-site http://hvttconference.com.

As you can see from the name this is the 12^th conference in this series which began in Kelowna, Canada in 1987.  I have personally been to 10 of the 11 previous conferences and I have always come away enthused and inspired by new ideas and innovative approaches that have been applied in other countries.  Most of the issues we face in the transport industry are common around the world although often different countries will have different priorities and local factors will mean that solutions that are appropriate for one jurisdiction may not be suitable for another without being modified or adapted in some way.  Nevertheless, we can learn a lot from the innovations and the problems experienced by others.  The HVTT conferences have been a unique forum for bringing together researchers, government agencies including policymakers, regulators and infrastructure managers, vehicle manufacturers and transport operators from all parts of the globe.  For European subscribers to this newsletters, in particular, this is an opportunity that should not be missed.

Here in New Zealand, we are basking in the glory of having just (narrowly) won the Rugby World Cup.  We are currently in the middle of an election campaign which is also going a bit like the Rugby.  Four of five weeks ago the current government was looking like a certainty to be returned but increasingly it looks like it will be very close.  There are significant differences in the views of the different parties on the role of road transport relative to that of other transport modes, although in practical terms the effects are likely to be quite small.

Best wishes for the Christmas and remember to submit your abstract for HVTT12 ASAP.

Regards,

John de Pont

We are in the middle of spring and the African sun is already helping to us to prepare for another hot summer. Fortunately we have had good spring rains in many parts of the country.  But many South African eyes are pointed further south – at the Rugby World Cup currently taking place in New Zealand.  One of the critical matches takes place on Sunday when South Africa plays Australia in the semi-finals.

The South African government is currently proposing the introduction of a CO₂ tax of somewhere between US$10 and US$25 per ton of CO₂ emitted by road vehicles. Should this proposed regulation be implemented, there will be a renewed drive in the road freight industry to improve efficiency through obvious means such as better vehicle maintenance as well as less obvious approaches such as the Performance-Based Standards (PBS)/Smart Truck programme, which is in a demonstration phase, for higher productivity vehicles.

By far the most controversial transport-related debate in recent months has been with regards the introduction of an open road tolling (ORT) system, currently the largest worldwide,  on Phase 1 of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, which comprises 200 km of upgraded freeways in the province of Gauteng (Johannesburg/Pretoria area).  The initial proposed toll fees of approximately 6 US cents per km (cpk) for light motor vehicles and from 20 to 40 US cpk for heavy vehicles have, following a major public and industry outcry and subsequent recommendations of a Ministerial working group, been reduced to approximately 5 US cpk for light motor vehicles and from 12 to 25 US cpk for trucks.  Besides servicing the US$ 2.3 billion loan for the project, the toll fees will no doubt encourage commuters to consider public transport or ride-sharing as alternative transport options.  Consumers will ultimately pay for the toll fees charged to freight vehicles.

I trust that many of you are giving serious thought to submitting an extended abstract for the 2012 HVTT12 conference in Stockholm. The closing date for abstracts is 1 Dec

Please visit http://hvttconference.com for further details.

All the best and drive safely

Paul Nordengen

IFRTT President

Welcome to the 12^th Heavy Vehicle Transport Technology symposium in Stockholm 16-19 September 2012!

The aim is to provide a forum for discussions and the exchange of ideas amongst legislators, road administrators, academics and consultants, vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, transport organizations and transporters. We are expecting delegates from all continents, with over 50 technical papers for presentation and discussion. The HVTT12 theme is “Setting Future Standards” with seven sub-themes:

• Vehicle-Infrastructure Interaction
• Road Safety
• Energy and Carbon Footprint
• Implementing ITS
• Innovative and High Productivity Vehicles
• The Transport Task: policies, logistics and co-modality
• Road Network Performance

Extended abstracts are to be submitted by Nov 1^st 2011. Detailed information about the submission procedure will follow shortly. Proceedings from all previous HVTT symposia can be found at road-transport-technology.org

The first EU proposal for Heavy Duty Vehicle fuel consumption and CO₂ generation measurement is due in 2012 and the European Commission has promised participation.

The public part of the great IAA truck show in Hanover, Germany, starts this week in September 2012.

There will be a stimulating evening program to facilitate informal get-togethers. The venue is secluded in a park area as well as close to Arlanda International Airport and to the Stockholm city centre. Accompanying persons are free of room charge at the venue. In mid-September 2012 the weather will be excellent.

Visit hvttconference.com for further information.

The HVTT12 is presented by the International Forum for Road Transport Technology with the Nordic Road Association working group NVF Vehicles and Transports as Swedish host.

The symposium is supported by The Swedish Government, the Swedish Transport Administration and the Swedish Transport Agency. The International Road Transport Union IRU, the Swedish Road Haulage Association, the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute VTI, the Royal Institute of Technology KTH, Vectura, Volvo and Scania have joined as partners and we expect many more to join. For partnership, contact per-erik.winberg <at> trafikverket.se or anders_a.lundstrom <at> scania.com

We look forward to meeting you in beautiful Stockholm in September 2012. In the meantime, drive safely,

Anders Lundström, Chairman HVTT12 Scientific Committee

Training, education, capacity building, expertise etc. are generally lacking in various sectors in most Developing Countries, and South Africa is no exception.  In addition, a large proportion of heavy vehicles in such countries operate at unacceptable levels of fitness.  I recently attended my third “Brake & Tyre Watch” in Bloemfontein, a private initiative by a local trucking magazine, Fleetwatch, in an attempt to address the above two problems in the road freight industry. The first day consisted of lectures by industry experts, particularly with regards brakes and tyres, to approximately 60 traffic police officers.  The second day consisted of on-the-job training at a vehicle testing centre, where heavy vehicles were thoroughly checked by experts together with groups of officers.  Of the 26 trucks checked, 22 were served with discontinuation notices and a further three charged for brake- or tyre-related offences and subsequently released.  To date, over 600 traffic police officers have attended such events and of the 325 vehicles inspected, 204 (63%) have been served with discontinuation notices.  Thus, while the ongoing development of truck components and systems to improve truck safety performance is essential, lack of vehicle maintenance, together with inadequate enforcement, remains a major contributing factor to the poor road safety statistics in many Developing Countries.

One of the alternative approaches that is being pursued in South Africa in order to address this unacceptable situation, is self-regulation through the voluntary implementation of management system standards by transport operators, consignors and consignees.  Up to now, progress has been relatively slow (there are approximately 30 certified organisations), but there have been some encouraging results within individual organisations as well as industry sectors that have or are in the process of implementing these standards.

At the same time, ISO/PC 241 is well on its way to finalising a new standard, ISO 39001 – Road Traffic Safety Management Systems.  The committee will be having its 6^th meeting in Adelaide, Australia, from 9 to 13 May, after which is it likely that a Draft International Standard (DIS) will be released for comment.  The IFRTT was accepted as a Liaison Organisation of ISO/PC 241 earlier this year, so please feel free to contact me if you would like further information or would like to submit comments on the DIS through the IFRTT.  Once released, I will forward the DIS to all IFRTT Board members.  I believe that this new ISO standard has a significant potential of saving lives on the road through its implementation in Developing Countries.

Last week, Anders Lundström, a member of the HVTT12 Organising Committee, met with seven European IFRTT Board Members at Schipol Airport to discuss various issues regarding the planning of the next Heavy Vehicle Transport Technology conference in September 2012 in Stockholm.  From what I can gather (the bulk of the notes of the meeting are in Swedish), the meeting was very worthwhile.  We are grateful for the efforts of Anders and the other Organising Committee members in the planning of the conference.  Please look out for the call for abstracts towards the end of this year.

Autumn is one of my favourite seasons in Pretoria.  We have just had our first taste of winter and there is a noticeable nip in the air in the early mornings (by SA standards).  We had our first frost in various parts of the country within the past week.  Admittedly, maximum daytime temperatures are still reaching the low 20’s and in some areas 30°C.

Best regards and drive safely

Paul Nordengen

IFRTT President

Greetings and best wishes for the New Year from the antipodes.

In the past this forum has been used to discuss technical issues of interest to, at least, some of the subscribers.  In recent times, apart from the monthly newsletters, it has become primarily a bulletin board for advertising conferences, courses and jobs.  While this function is important and useful I think it is a shame that the forum’s role in promoting discussions and exchanges of ideas has declined.  So to try to promote some revival of the discussion function I thought I would present a few ideas on an issue that subscribers may agree or disagree with in the hope that you will express your views in responses via the forum.

Current concerns about climate change are driving substantial efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the most obvious step is to improve fuel efficiency.  Recent weather events in various part of the world have heightened these concerns.  Even if you don’t accept the climate change argument it is indisputable that fossil fuels are a finite resource and we owe it to future generations not to waste this resource.  Although the vehicle manufacturers are putting substantial resources into technological solutions to address the issue, there are a number of measures that can be implemented right now using existing technology that can have a significant impact on fuel consumption.

For light vehicles the most obvious measure is downsizing the vehicles.  In New Zealand (and in many the other countries) the average size of vehicles has steadily increased over the years and as a result the benefits of the fuel efficiency gains achieved by the manufacturers have been partially eroded.  In New Zealand the average vehicle occupancy is 1.6 people and the maximum speed limit is 100km/h.  Both of these requirements are easily accommodated by the smallest cars on the market so why are there so many larger cars?  Safety is a factor.  Although many small cars have excellent safety performance, the barrier crash tests effectively simulate a collision with an identical vehicle.  If a small car collides with a substantially larger car Newtonian mechanics dictate that the occupants of the small car will experience greater decelerations and are more likely to suffer injuries even if the safety performance of the small car is inherently better than that of the large car.  If everybody else drives a small car you are much safer in a large car.  However, safety is not the only factor.  The most popular large car in New Zealand is available with either a V6 or a V8 engine.  The two vehicles are the same size and virtually identical in appearance but the V8 option is 24% more powerful and uses nearly 26% more fuel.  The V6 option has more than enough power for the vehicle to perform its functions yet a significant proportion of sales are for the V8 option.  Why?

With heavy commercial vehicles, paradoxically, both upsizing and downsizing can improve fuel efficiency.  Upsizing through increasing vehicle size and weight limits reduces the amount of fuel required per tonne-km of payload.  Various initiatives are in progress in different jurisdictions and we will not discuss these further here.  However, for a given transport task there are fuel efficiency opportunities in better matching the engine power and transmission configuration to the transport task.  Erik Dahlberg presented a paper on this topic at our last symposium in Melbourne with an example that showed a fuel efficiency gain of 3.4% compared to the standard vehicle used for the task.  Generally this means downsizing the engine power.  In New Zealand the maximum allowable gross combination weight for general access is 44 tonnes and this has not changed for more than 20 years.  The speed limit for heavy vehicles is 90km/h.  20 years ago the typical maximum weight combination had a 350-450hp engine.  Today the typical engine power for new 44 tonnes vehicles is 500-600hp.  The New Zealand roading environment is relatively hilly and so there are potential travel time benefits from increased engine power.  However, I believe these are overstated as we will see in the next paragraph.

The other way in which substantial gains in fuel efficiency can be achieved is through driver training.  Last year the New Zealand Ministry of Transport sponsored the development and introduction of a driver training programme for fuel efficiency called SAFED-NZ (Safe and Fuel Efficient Driving).  This programme is based on a similar programme of the same name developed in the UK and the introduction to New Zealand involved getting one of the developers of the UK programme to come to New Zealand to train a group of senior driving instructors.  These senior driving instructors will both deliver the programme and train other driving instructors on how to deliver the programme.  The basic principles of the SAFED driving are very simple and one would think obvious to any experienced driver.  Yet even this very experienced group of driver trainers achieved an average improvement in fuel efficiency of 5% from undertaking the course.  This is based on before and after measurements on a 40km test circuit.  Significantly the average travel time for the “after” circuit was 6% less than that on the “before” circuit.  That is, not only did the drivers use less fuel (and by implication less average engine power) they also achieved a higher average speed.  This result is based on a very small sample and cannot be generalised but it does suggest that the negative impacts on travel time of a fuel efficient driving style and lower engine power will be small.

Although these savings in fuel consumption may appear quite modest they have a substantial impact on profitability.  In New Zealand there is no road tax on diesel (road user charges are collected separately) and so fuel is relatively cheap.  Nevertheless, depending on the type of transport operation, fuel represents 15-20% of total costs.  In countries that collect road user charges through fuel tax it will be significantly higher proportion (perhaps double).  A 5% reduction in fuel consumption can increase profits by about 1% of turnover.  Trucking in New Zealand is a very competitive business and many operators’ profits are less than 5% of turnover, hence this represents a 20% increase in profit, which is very significant.

With an economic incentive of this magnitude we might expect an immediate large scale uptake of these measures by the industry but this has not happened.  A number of operators here have seen the opportunities and are implementing driver training for fuel efficiency programmes and looking at vehicle selection policies but many others are not.  This raises the obvious question; why not?  My personal view is that they don’t believe the results apply to them.  Specifically they don’t believe that their drivers can reduce their fuel consumption significantly; they don’t believe that fuel-efficient driving practices will not substantially increase trip times; they don’t believe that fitting lower-powered engines will save fuel; and they don’t believe that using lower-powered engines will not substantially increase trip times.

As I said at the outset one of my aims in writing this is to try to stimulate a discussion.  Some people may think I have got it all wrong.  Please say so and why.  Others may think the situation in their country is completely different.  Again I am very interested to hear how it is different and particularly why it is different.

Regards to you all,

John de Pont

Click to view discussion on this topic

During the first week of November I spent a most enjoyable week in Berlin (what a majestic and interesting city!) attending the 5^th meeting of the ISO/PC 241 committee, which had the task of reviewing the comments on Committee Draft 2 of ISO 39001, Road Traffic Safety Management Systems.  This is a new ISO standard (due to be published by early 2013) that will be relevant to all organisations that have an impact on road safety.  This includes road authorities (planners, designers and operators), vehicle manufacturers, consignors (shippers), consignees (receivers of freight), freight and passenger transport operators and emergency response organisations.  As in the case of ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, the standard is generic, and organisations will be responsible for identifying and monitoring their own intermediate safety outcome factors in addition to the final safety outcome factors (deaths and serious injuries).  The Editorial Committee is now busy preparing Committee Draft 3, which will be distributed to Participating and Observing member countries as well as liaison organisations (including the GRSP, World Bank and OECD) during January 2011 for further comments.

Mårten Johansson, one of our Board Members, also attended the meeting in Berlin and after some discussion, we felt that it would be worthwhile for the IFRTT to become a liaison organisation.  This would allow Forum members to submit formal comments on ISO CD3 39001 as well as the DIS (Draft International Standard), which will be circulated for comment during the latter half of 2011.  As a result of overwhelming support from the IFRTT Board, I have submitted a request to the ISO/PC 241 Secretariat for the IFRTT to become a liaison organisation.  For those of you who are interested, I have attached a presentation on the development of this new standard and the activities of ISO/PC 241 in Berlin.  Some of the slides are courtesy of Claes Tingvall, chairman of the committee or Peter Hartzell, the secretary.

The night before I left Berlin, I had a most enjoyable dinner with Klaus-Peter Glaeser, one of our Board Members, and his wife in trendy area of Prenzlauer Berg.  He also gave me a guided tour of what was West Berlin, as I had spent most of the week in the old East Berlin.

On the home front, South Africa has made another step forward in its “Smart Truck” initiative with the commissioning of 9 (identical) PBS vehicles in the forestry industry.  These consist of Scania R500 8×4 rigid trucks with a 5-axle drawbar trailer – see attached photos.  The overall length is 25.1 m, combination mass is 70 tons and payload approximately 50,8 tons.

Weather-wise, we are well into summer; in fact this year we seemed to spring straight from winter to summer, with little time to acclimatise to the South African summer heat.  Fortunately the rains have started in earnest although parts of the country are still suffering from drought and serious water shortages.

Kind regards and drive safely

Paul Nordengen