Rolf Lockwood

Rolf Lockwood is editor emeritus of Today's Trucking and a regular contributor to Trucknews.com.

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Got Enough Light?

I've long held that North American headlight standards are inherently dangerous because they don't allow brightness levels to match the speeds we travel. It's just too easy to over-drive your lights, meaning you don't see obstructions like stalled cars or animals or -- may all the gods forbid -- pedestrians in the way until you're past the point of being able to stop in time. Even back in the 1950s when cars and certainly trucks were much slower, this held true. In fact it was worse.

The rise of autonomous vehicles

This year marked major milestones in the push toward autonomous vehicles. Freightliner unveiled a truck that could drive itself in Nevada. Platoons of trucks from DAF, Iveco, MAN, Scania, Volvo and Daimler made their tightly packed trips to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. A self-driving truck made possible by Otto delivered a load of beer to Colorado Springs. And Canada's first autonomous truck is part of a Suncor trial in Alberta's oil patch. Stay tuned for more. The march of technology continues.

IN PRINT — Top 10 products of 2016

Here we go again. Another year finished and another chance to head way out on a limb and name 10 products that I think are especially worthy of note from 2016. It's an entirely subjective review, of course, and you may well disagree with every last one of them. So be it. My shortlist was three times as long, not surprisingly. To make things a little easier I've ruled out, as usual, whole trucks and trailers and other products that may have been announced but weren't actually available in 2016. That left out some cool machinery from Freightliner and International, among others. Given the profusion of products in the realm of electronic logs and fleet management software, I felt I had to leave that one alone as well. I could have filled my entire list and still left out some good ones, so I opted to ignore it entirely. With one exception.