TORONTO, ON -- An acquaintance of mine once quipped that he hates picking winners for different contests. Sure, you'll make a friend, he said, but you're still annoying plenty of people who didn't make the cut. So it is when picking the Top 10 products of the year. Today's Trucking's annual look at the top in tech involves looking at hundreds of launches from throughout North America.
TORONTO, ON -- An acquaintance of mine once quipped that he hates picking winners for different contests. Sure, you'll make a friend, he said, but you're still annoying plenty of people who didn't make the cut. So it is when picking the Top 10 products of the year. Today's Trucking's annual look at the top in tech involves looking at hundreds of launches from throughout North America. Trucks themselves have been excluded, but everything else was fair game in my review of components and other offerings that have been improved, reinvented, and reimagined.
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.