When we first launched Today’s Trucking almost 19 years ago, I remember only too well a discussion about our need for a fax machine. Not which one we needed, not how many fancy functions it should possess, but whether we had to have one at all. Seems incredible now.

In fact, such tools were primitive back then, and nearly two decades later they seem primitive again. But we couldn’t have done without it, obviously. I very rarely communicate via fax nowadays but for many years it was a lifesaver in terms of time and expense.

Got my first computer that year as well, if you don’t count the earlier Texas Instruments machine that used an ordinary tape recorder as its storage medium. A little DOS machine with no hard drive. And floppy disks that were actually floppy.

To some, 1987 may sound like the ice age, but it’s really only yesterday.

I was thinking about that fax discussion as I sat in a U.S. conference room in mid-October. Pedro Ferro, ArvinMeritor’s Commercial Vehicle Systems vice-president and general manager of Emissions and Specialty Products, was rolling through a PowerPoint presentation on the company’s advanced emissions-control products at its Technology Center in Columbus, Ind.

In the room with me and Pedro were three chemists and engineers with individual brain cells way bigger than the total smarts my sorry little computer offered 19 years back.

Contributing to the discussion in voices as clear as if they were beside me even though they were a continent away, and following the two-hour presentation in real time, were two others: Clive Telford, director of engineering in the company’s burgeoning emissions business; and Silvio Angori, general manager of its global OEM business with respect to emissions. Telford was in Warton, Lancashire, Angori was in Rome, and I was in rural Indiana thinking that we’d come a few miles from the days when fax machines were the height of our communications ability.

On a huge screen in front of me, not incidentally, I was looking at fascinating technology like ArvinMeritor’s ‘Plasma Fuel Reformer’, also referred to — maybe ironically — as the ‘plasmatron’. Shades of Woody Allen. It’s a regenerator for cleaning nitrogen-oxide traps found in the diesel emissions systems that we’ll be using in 2010. It’s also very efficient at self-generating onboard hydrogen, so the technology can also be developed as a bridge to fuel cells, Ferro says.

As if all of that high-tech wizardry weren’t enough, two weeks earlier I found myself at DaimlerChrysler’s huge test track and R&D facility in northwestern Germany. The company’s Commercial Vehicles Division was holding its biannual ‘Technology Days’ for some of the international press, and they had 50 different examples of electronic tricks to show off. Some of them are near to market, and a few would astonish you. Almost all of them are geared to improving road safety.

I can only scratch the surface here of what I saw there (more will follow), but I’ve got to mention one example of not-so-far-out gizmology — automatic trailer hitching and unhitching. Mercedes-Benz already offers fifth-wheel coupling by remote control, but they’re working on automatic coupling that will also include automatic connection of air and electric lines. No kidding.

Or how about the ‘Reversing Assistant’ that sees the driver roll into a dock or back under a container using only a joystick? Cameras and sensors chart the truck’s course and a screen on the dash shows the driver where he is. He guides the vehicle with the joystick while the actual precision steering is done automatically. I rode shotgun on a demo of this one, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. We backed a straight truck with a 28-ft pup around a 90-degree corner and under a container on stands. The driver never looked in his mirrors and never touched the steering wheel.

Pardon me for being the wide-eyed innocent here, but the truth is I once had a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle with rod-operated brakes. Really. A German domestic model with no hydraulics. Four steel rods emanated from the pedal to the wheels, and hardly ever in unison. I’m not kidding.

Rod-operated brakes. Exceedingly floppy disks. All the way to plasmatrons and steering a big truck with a joystick. I love this new world.