October 17, 2018 Vol. 15 No. 20

First off, my apologies for not producing a newsletter on October 3 as scheduled. Strangely enough, I found myself in a hospital emergency room the night before I was due to post, and I hadn’t finished writing. Stuck there for many hours, I had no choice but to abandon the process entirely for the first time in 15 years.

Yes — thanks for asking — I’m OK.

Well, mostly. The thing is, at the crazy rate we see technology announcements being made these days, I now feel even more overwhelmed than usual with things that I want to write about. It’s truly astonishing, and in the month since my last newsletter on September 19 we’ve had a major new-truck introduction — the Kenworth W990 — plus a ton of news out of the IAA Commercial Vehicles Show in Germany and more developments in the tech world than you’d believe. My file directory for this edition of The Lockwood Report is insanely full.

As you might expect, much of that material involves electrification in one form or another. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the entire world’s fleet will be powered by batteries some time next year. It certainly won’t, and never will, but the engineering efforts moving us in that direction are monumentally big.

In Hannover, it was electric this and electric that, but in the real world diesel still dominates.

“So far, nothing is more efficient than a diesel engine,” said Andreas Renschler, head of Traton, the newly named Volkswagen Truck and Bus AG that includes Navistar as well as MAN, Scania, and the commercial-vehicle side of VW itself. He was speaking at IAA.

I’ll get back to electric stuff but I’m going to start with hydrogen fuel cells.

DID YOU KNOW THAT the fourth annual Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Day took place on October 8? No, I didn’t either. Apparently it’s a concoction of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) aimed at raising awareness and celebrating advances in fuel cell and hydrogen technologies.