Diesel Progress Report

Over the last several years, I’ve seen a lot more interest in the idea of plug-in hybrids and/or all-electric vehicles. Most of the activity has been in the automotive markets – think the highly anticipated Chevy Volt – but more recently, there has been more attention paid to things like plug-in commercial vans, P&D vehicles and other lighter fleet-type applications. Several have been on display at shows this year.

On the surface, what’s not to like about plug-ins? No emissions! Almost no noise! More than acceptable range (they say)! Performance that can rival gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles! The answer is right here, the proponents proclaim.

From a technical standpoint, they’re probably right. It does appear, if the tests by several large P&D fleets are any indication, that plug-in technology is pretty close to being commercial, at least in some applications. I suspect it won’t be as pervasive as the true believers insist – does anybody really think that guys who work in the oilfields will give up their 300 hp Rams or Super Duty pickups for a plug-in? – but there will be many applications where it might actually make sense.

Still, one has to wonder about the overall impact a significant application of plug-in technology will have on air quality. Maybe not quite as much as some believe, simply because of where electricity comes from (and the correct answer is not from a wall socket).

 A variety of technologies are used to generate power in the U.S. A lot of it comes through hydropower (think Hoover Dam), which is an effective, but somewhat exploited resource. They’re not making too many new rivers to dam these days.

There is some wind and solar generation capacity, even some nuclear, most of which dates back to the ’60s and ’70s. But the greatest percentage of non-hydro generation involves burning something – a petroleum based fuel, natural gas or that Black Devil, coal.

Say that over the next 10 years, we add five million plug-ins to the fleet, thereby removing five million vehicles driven by gasoline or diesel engines. It’s a victory for clean air, right?

Maybe not, because what it would mean is that somehow, we’d have to come up with a few additional gigawatts of electricity. Most likely, that would mean a slew of new powerplants would need to be built. By default and because it’s one of the easiest plants to get up and running in short order, some of them would doubtless be coal-fired.

It seems to me from a macro emissions standpoint, you might just be trading a bunch of small emitters for a lesser number of large emitters, with no real net gain in overall air quality.  Yes, from a regulator’s point of view, it is easier to keep track of stationary powerplants than a few million wheeled vehicles. But it seems to me that in the grand scheme of things, you might end up merely shifting emissions from one place to another in a kind of whack-a-mole game.

And it might be a pretty expensive game to play.

I have to confess it – I’m not sure what I think about “sustainability.” Part of the problem is that I’m not entirely certain what it means.

Sure, I get the “ability to manage and maintain resources for the long term benefit of people and the environment” part. And I suspect that – like most other emerging trends – it’s something that a lot of companies had a handle on before there was a buzzword to go with it. Reminds me of those hot new business books that come along, promising “10 winning strategies for successful business!” and they turn out to be things like “Take care of your customers!” and “Watch your costs!” Well, golly, thanks, I never would have thought about doing any of that, but now I sure will.

There is no question that using natural resources and energy in a sustainable way is – like clean air, clean water, mom, apple pie, etc. – hard to argue with. And it’s laudable that some of the world’s largest engine and equipment manufacturers have turned their collective brainpower toward ensuring that there will be a future for them and the rest of us.

Yet I always wonder about how much things like sustainability mean the farther down the food chain you go. Does the excavating contractor, when he looks at buying a new wheel loader, really care much about the manufacturer’s sustainability efforts? Will that contractor care if one machine OEM is more comprehensive in its sustainability efforts than another’s – to the point where he or she will buy Sustainable Company X’s machine and not Company Y’s?

One step farther, does the general contractor who hired the excavating contractor care that a company may or may not have spent millions on sustainability?

As I am not sure about any of the answers here, I turn to you, good reader, for enlightenment. Tell me:

- How do you define sustainability?

- How important is sustainability to you?

- How important do you think it is to your customers?

- Are there things you’d like to know about sustainability and/or is it something you’d like to read more about?

Please let us know.

Is it a classic tale of unrequited love? One of the parties involved seems to show an unquenched desire for the other. But in this heartbreaking and tearful yarn the object of such possible yearning seems blind to the overtures.

Only this time the leading players are the less than romantic potential couple JCB and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).

So what is it between them? There have long been suggestions that the former was interested in buying the Jaguar part of Jaguar Land Rover.

JCB’s chairman Sir Anthony Bamford was quoted as long as four years ago as mulling over buying Jaguar from its then owner Ford of the US, but without Land Rover being part of the deal.

Any rumored agreement for part of JLR, a business built around the two classic British car brands, didn’t happen.

Sir Anthony is a firm supporter and champion of British engineering so perhaps his reported enthusiasm for considering purchasing Jaguar was partly built on supporting UK plc. (Let’s overlook the fact that Jaguar, an icon of English engineering heritage, is in fact now part of, er, Tata Motors, India’s largest automobile company.)

But the embers of affection still glowed long after a possible tie-up died.

The romance flared when the amiable Matthew Taylor left a senior position at Land Rover to briefly become JCB’s chief executive only to later depart. Taylor, incidentally, recently popped up again as the new ceo of Edwards – a diversified maker of, amongst other things, high-tech vacuum and exhaust management equipment. 

And even more recently JCB underlined its liking for bosses from its lost love when it announced it had appointed Michael Mohan as group engineering director. Surprise, surprise he joins from Jaguar Land Rover, where he was strategic business office director.

Timing, as has often been said, is everything in life. And it looks as if the timing might just work out quite nicely for Navistar.

As the lone North American truck and engine manufacturer not using selective catalytic reduction (SCR) for NOx control in 2010, Navistar has been pummeled from a lot of corners of the industry, the press and the financial community for its position. Quite reasonably, the thinking goes that if everyone else goes in one direction and Navistar goes another, well, Navistar has got to be wrong, right?

Of course, being Chicago guys, Navistar has given as good as its gotten from a marketing standpoint, much of it through the salesmanship and take-no-prisoners attitude personified by Jim Hebe. Love him or hate him – and there are a lot of people who would walk through fire for him and probably as many who would like to set him on fire – he has been an indelible part of the heavy-duty truck market in North America for the better part of two decades.

But the question really comes down to whether or not Navistar can make its no SCR strategy work over the long term.

And it’s becoming more apparent that the answer is clearly yes.

How?

By going to SCR.

But not SCR as it has been used in Europe for some years and that has made “DEF” the newest TLA (three-letter acronym) du jour.

And certainly not the SCR that would result if Navistar just threw in the towel and started putting Cummins ISX 15 engines into its trucks. That was one of the more out-there conclusions floated by an industry analyst not too long ago. 

No the SCR Navistar will likely employ is likely to be one of the interesting SCR technologies that Tenneco (and some other companies) have in the latter stages of development. The technologies from Tenneco (shameless plug incoming!) are covered in some detail in the July issue of Diesel Progress, and I won’t repeat myself (too much) here.

But in brief, Tenneco will go into production in 2012 with two forms of SCR, neither of which use liquid urea as a reductant. For the most part, Navistar has been precise in always slamming urea-based SCR as “onerous” to the user. It was always the liquid urea factor – the price, the consumption, the fact that it can freeze, etc. – that Navistar took some issue with.

Tenneco is offering two systems that eliminate liquid urea altogether. One incorporates a solid substance that is sublimated into gaseous ammonia which is then sent into the SCR catalyst.

The far more interesting technology is a SCR system that uses a hydrocarbon  – either diesel fuel or E85 – as the reductant. The benefits of using diesel are obvious: no additional tank of anything, just basically run an additional line from the fuel tank to the aftertreatment. Out of the box, it provides a NOx reduction of about 60%, with a fuel consumption of about 1%. So if Mr. Engine Manufacturer can develop combustion strategies that get him 40% of the way to compliance, this system can take him the rest of the way.

Using E85 is even more effective, providing NOx reductions greater than 90%. There is an additional tank, but the dosing is small enough to make it a service item – replenished in the shop at 50,000 miles when the oil is changed, for example – and unlike aqueous urea, E85 doesn’t freeze, meaning there is no need for heaters.

There is no hard indication that Navistar is definitely planning on adopting either of these technologies, though Tenneco officials noted that Navistar is a longtime customer.  In 2009, Navistar did invest in Amminex, a Danish technology company that is in development with a metal ammine-based NOx reductant delivery system. And certainly, there are other companies out there that are in development with similar technologies.

Skeptics might (might?) still skewer Navistar for going this route after such a long time appearing to fight against SCR (though again, usually mentioning the aqueous urea kind). But such a move would certainly be in keeping with the company’s “compliance is our responsibility” mantra. And I’m not sure the truck market at large would much care if Navistar chose an alternative SCR path.

The only question that remains is whether or not Navistar, which is using a combination of earned emissions credits and its enhanced EGR technology, can make those credits last until 2012, when Tenneco and others will have their systems available. Navistar Chairman Dan Ustian appeared to put that concern to rest recently when he recently stated that Navistar had anywhere from “two to five or six years” worth of credits – with the range being a function of sales. By that reckoning, when Navistar decides which direction it’s going, a way to get there will be available.

So as has been said in other venues, the rumors of Navistar’s imminent demise (or a sudden U-turn) are greatly exaggerated. Maybe the company did take a chance with its all-in strategy. But it looks like now, that bet has a real chance to pay off.

Hey – I’m all for gambling. The chance to spin and win and fingers-crossed become a millionaire has a certain appeal that is hard to walk away from. My head tells me, “You never know it could happen to you…Today could be your lucky day!” While this hasn’t been the case (yet), I keep trying.

With Vegas as gambling headquarters, the beauty is you can bet on virtually anything from the Super Bowl coin toss to the winner of American Idol but, the email I got today took gambling, betting and wagering to an all time low.

I got an email from a European gaming service taking bets on the first species of aquatic animals to become extinct as a direct result of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I am sorry, call me sensitive, an animal lover, tree hugger or even a girl with feelings, but glorifying the possibility of animal extinction because of human error disgusts me on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin.

Sorry, but some things are just off limits and I don’t know if it’s because today is Monday, but this has really set me off. Seeing the odds on the extinction of the Loggerhead Turtle at 12/1 and the Blue Whale at 16/1 doesn’t exactly give me the same feel of excitement as seeing an ace and a king at the black jack table.

I don’t need to tell you about the damage and devastation the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has caused, TV, the Internet and YouTube have taken care of that. But, I will tell you not to bet against the animals that will lose their lives because of this accident. Enough is enough.

Maybe this gaming service should take the proceeds from its online betting ring and send some Dawn dishwashing soap. I heard it works great on removing grease.

I try not to look for too much wisdom in movies – perhaps at least not beyond the Solomonic wisdom of “Blazing Saddles” or “Dude, Where’s My Car?” anyway. But there was a line from the 1980s film “Field Of Dreams” that has always stuck with me.

An old man, lamenting his one-day stint in the Major Leagues in which he never got a chance to bat, observed that “we just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening.”

I thought of this in light of two different occurrences in two different continents that may, in retrospect, turn out to be extremely significant for the engine-powered equipment industry, both here and across the world.

One was the $5 million in civil penalties that national auto parts retailer Pep Boys and its importer were hit with over the import and sale of Chinese motorcycles, recreational vehicles and generators that did not comply with EPA clean air standards. It’s considered to be the largest vehicle and engine importation case to date and the largest penalty ever.

Pep Boys sold at least 241,000 illegal vehicles and engines from 2004 through 2009. As the case (surprisingly) revealed, Pep Boys was the third largest importer of Chinese-made all terrain vehicles into the U.S. and in 2006 and 2007, it was the fourth-largest importer of generators.

Over the last several years I have seen – at local hardware stores and even in one case a discount grocery chain – small engine powered equipment for sale at low, low prices. Things like 5 kW gen-sets for $299, garden tillers for $100 and light motorcycles for $250. You can never really find anything that says who makes them or where they come from, even though in many cases, the livery, logos and badging mimic well-known brands. But it’s clear from the impossibly small price tags that these are knockoffs and even if the labeling doesn’t say “Made In China” clearly anywhere, there is little doubt as to where they originated.

In some cases, I’ve seen stickers on the machines that indicate that they are “certified” to meet emissions -clearly an impossibility at those price points. Clean air requires money and the cost of compliance has been reflected in the rising price of even the smallest equipment. There is no getting around that, no matter where it’s manufactured or how cheap the labor is.

It’s been noted in some corners that a $5 million penalty to a $1.9 billion company amounts to less than a slap on the wrist. That may be true, but any figure that has a dollar sign on the left side and six zeroes on the other is absolutely going to get the attention of the company’s management, no matter how big. It ain’t peanuts, even to Manny, Moe and Jack.

And in this era, nobody, but nobody, wants to be perceived as being anything but very green. Especially when selling to consumers.

Chances are, Pep Boys was ratted out by some customer or possibly even someone that sells generators who happened to see some of this equipment sitting in a shop somewhere and made a call or sent an e-mail to EPA. Hat’s off to that person and also to the EPA and the Justice Department for stepping in.

Hopefully, this kind of thing will become a trend. A few more high profile events like this and maybe we can all breathe a little easier (especially those companies that make and sell gen-sets).

The second event that may ultimately be seismic in its impact also involves China. This one occurred in Germany, at the recent Bauma 2010, when English equipment icon JCB convinced a German court to issue injunctions against a pair of Chinese manufacturers over loaders that JCB said resembled its own backhoes and Loadalls a little too closely.

The result was that machines were either covered up or taken off the show floor. That would be a huge thumb in the eye in any venue, but even more so for it happening at Bauma, even one humbled somewhat by an Icelandic ash cloud.

A JCB official noted that “JCB invests many years and many millions of pounds developing and innovating new products and it’s clearly unfair for any manufacturer to then simply free-ride on the results of that investment and research. As an industry we all have to unite to prevent such unlawful practices.”

Hear, hear!

Those old enough (like me) to remember when “Made in Japan” was synonymous with “Cheap Junk” can see parallels in a number of Chinese manufacturers that are evolving into high-quality suppliers of engines, components and equipment. It won’t be long until they will compete head-to-head with the global leaders from other regions and win their share fairly. No one begrudges them their opportunities.

But there are those other kinds of Chinese manufacturers, the ones that specialize in reverse engineering and making things that look and feel just like the real thing, only at a third the price. They do so by mimicking the intellectual property and designs of others. And when all you do is copy something, you’re almost sure to miss some things, like machine safety and emissions compliance.

The very public incident at Bauma is likely to have shamed and embarrassed some Chinese manufacturers. And it’s likely to encourage others to follow JCB’s lead and insist that legal authorities enforce the rules that everyone has to live by. We can only hope for both of those things.

Two events, thousands of miles apart … maybe they’ll be the things we look back on as the start of much bigger things.

One of the fun things about blogging is you don’t have to be a serious industry journalist all the time. You can have fun, once in awhile.

Besides industry issues, commentary or impressions, things we can’t do in print, one of the other uses of a blog is we can occasionally give you a peek behind the scenes at how Diesel Progress works.

While I’m not the official Old Guy at Diesel, others have me in age and/or seniority, as the staff of Diesel Progress worked on the 75th anniversary issue, I did start to feel old.

Dawn Geske and Kyle Kopplin did a tremendous job assembling the pictures and writing the captions for our A Look Back section in the May issue. As could be expected they hooted and hollered and laughed repeatedly at some of the pictures, ads, and layouts from older issues. It’s when they were giggling over stuff that happened in the time I’ve been here, that the feeling of age started creeping in.

And I have to admit some of the ads from the 1960s and 1970s look really, really silly to current eyes. Some of the World War II ads were awesome—but in today’s politically correct world would have distracted people from the celebration of 75 years of monthly publishing. But they were fervent, to-the-point ads (albeit racist and jingoistic). In terms of the message they wanted to convey and doing exactly that in no uncertain terms, they’re classics.

Marisa Roberts and her über-talented production staff also had a gleeful time looking at the layouts and designs from years past. But they also marveled at how cool looking some of them were, even today. They picked a few for use in the May issue, which for one month only was redesigned to reflect styles of our earlier times. Interestingly the 1970s is about the only decade that got passed over.

For me personally it was a trip down 35 years of memory lane, issues, stories, events, but mostly people– here and throughout the industry.

We really went back and forth about how to honor 75 years of what we think is pretty good trade publishing. You only get one chance to yell “hey we’re 75!” and we didn’t wanna look back in a few years and say “you know we should have made a bigger deal about that.”

In the end we decided not to go crazy about it all—a huge party was considered and dismissed as an extravagance in these times. We also considered a 13th issue just about us and the history of the diesel engine and engine-powered equipment industry over the last 75 years—and again the economic analysis popped up with “no sale.”

In the end, I think we hit just about the right tone externally. Between digitally recreating our first issue and posting it on our web site, the redesign of the May issue and the pull-out poster with even more images and graphics covering 75 years, we did that part just about right.

Where I think we did it really well was internally. The younger half of our age map got to see that Diesel Progress didn’t start the day they were hired. They got to see that other talented, passionate people came before them, and maybe what they did looks funny today, but I reminded them that the people that do our 100th anniversary issue may have the same reaction to their work today.

They didn’t believe it, nor should they. Such is the advantage of youth.

But I’d really like to be a fly on the wall when the planning for the 100th anniversary issue starts. “Oh man look at this weird stuff they did in 2010!”

The very recent news that Navistar reached a five-year agreement with J.B. Hunt that will result in Hunt buying some 5000 ProStar trucks would seem to put to rest – at least for awhile – the torrent of gloom-and-doom predictions that have surrounded the company since it decided to focus on EGR as its primary emissions strategy rather than the SCR path embraced by nearly everyone else in the business.

The drumbeat was heightened recently by a pair of reports by a financial analyst who proclaimed Navistar’s engine strategy was a dead end – based in part by observations made from a parking lot at one of the company’s engine plants – and that it was going to go back to buying Cummins 15 L engines. Cummins would be glad to hear about that, but even Cummins doesn’t see Navistar retreating in any way from its EGR-only path.

The fact that Navistar is going in one direction and everyone else is going in another has roiled the industry like nothing I have seen in nearly 20 years covering this industry. The financial community is especially agog and is continually searching for concrete, definitive evidence that one technology is a winner and one is a loser. And because groupthink pretty much exists everywhere, conventional wisdom is that the loser has gotta be Navistar.

One very good European journalist who was participating in a recent conference call put together by an investment company, indicated that out in the real world, nobody buys technology per se. Instead, they went with the product that works best, which concerning engine emissions technology, was (in his view) SCR.

He’s exactly right that nobody buys technology. The purchaser for a trucking fleet buys trucks. He or she buys the truck that works best for the drivers, the type of service, the routes the trucks typically run.

But contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, there is more to that “works best” equation than fuel economy. A lot depends on history and tradition. A fleet that has run Kenworth trucks for years is likely to have a comfort level with Kenworth – they know how to service them effectively, they know how to fix them and they may even have some money tied up in service parts inventory. It’s going to take more than just the promise of a fuel economy improvement to get that fleet to change directions toward another manufacturer in a major way.

The local truck dealer can also play a very significant role. If I love my local Volvo dealer and he’s always gone the extra mile to take care of me, I’m probably going to try to buy most of my trucks from him. Similarly, if the other brand’s dealer is a jerk, I probably wouldn’t buy his trucks even if they could wash themselves and serve drinks.

You’ll even see some purchasing based on the unassailable logic of “my daddy drove Macks, his daddy drove Macks, I drive Macks.”

Such factors play a huge role in truck purchasing as does the knowledge that the absolute number one factor that determines fuel economy of a heavy-duty truck is the guy sitting in the driver’s seat. All truckers know this, which is why they have focused so hard over the years on driver training and tools designed to help drivers become better drivers.

All things being equal, SCR might indeed yield a 3% to 5% improvement in fuel economy. It’s just that out on the roads and highways, things are almost never equal.

If you listened to a lot of the chatter lately, you might expect to see a lot of change of market shares in the Class 8 trucking business this year. I think that’s unlikely, since there probably won’t be a significant increase in truck buying this year anyway. A slack tide floats no boats.

Yet it’s also likely that when push comes to shove – at least until there is some real experience with all of the new equipment and positives and negatives of each direction are known – buyers are going to default to their usual positions. If you’ve always bought Navistar trucks, chances are any trucks you buy this year are going to mostly be Navistars. If you’re a Freightliner fan, you’ll buy mostly Freightliners.

It’s reminiscent of the never-ending debate between PCs and Macs. Mac users are passionate in their belief that Steve Jobs’ creations are the ultimate achievement in personal computing. And while they may be correct if measured by speed, performance, capability, etc., the brute fact is that MacIntosh hold less than 10% marketshare, with PCs holding the rest.

No one suggests that MacIntosh is doomed or doesn’t know what it’s doing by going in a singular direction. And it’s not too far a stretch to think that Navistar might be in the same boat.

Many drivetrain and fluid power manufacturers are, more or less quietly, launching more or less (r)evolutionary concepts in transmission and hydraulic power technology.  Why?

A partial answer was heard at Bauma by the biggest of the big when Douglas R. Oberhelman, president of Caterpillar said that while the company is not discussing its strategy for Tier 4 final just yet, he did say that “the compliance will  also be reached by tuning the drivetrain.”

When someone says “Tier 4,” what first comes to mind is: engines and aftertreatment. Lately though, what we hear more and more is that the whole power and drive management will need to be involved in order to reach this most stringent off-highway emissions standard.

And with it comes an additional bonus:  a helping hand towards increased efficiency, and maybe also performance.

I remember in the period of the 1990s when a little (r)evolution took place in the world of transmission technology for mobile machinery: the advent of electronic controls.

My (open) question is then: Is another evolutionary step going to happen, here and now?  Will it involve continuous variable transmissions (CVTs, HVTs, whatever the name for the various concepts), hybrid solutions, energy recuperation…? Anything else up the sleeve? We’re open to bets!

One of the great philosophical questions that nearly everyone wrestles with at one time or another concerns each person’s place in the grand scheme of things. Two recent events brought this to mind.

 One was the May issue of Diesel Progress, with which our company’s founding property marked its 75^th year of monthly publication. That’s a milestone for any company, but considering the catastrophic upheaval in the publishing industry over the last several years, it’s an achievement for which many of us take special satisfaction.

 As a company we’ve survived wars, recessions of all types (including the great one that we all hope is waning), depressions (the Great One, founded as we were in the midst of it in 1935) and all manner of market swings and gyrations. It’s been noted that our company was profitable from the third issue onward and I firmly believe that our best days are still ahead of us.

To put together the special anniversary section and poster for the May issue, a number of us went through many of the 899 issues dating back to the very beginning. We saw pictures of Hitler, laughed over engines the size of Smart cars that boasted of developing nearly 150 hp (!) and the goofy-looking – to modern eyes, anyway – machinery and components (not to mention the clothing and hairdos).

Seeing all of the stories and ads were good for a lot of laughs and smiles, but what struck me over the hours of perusing the tabloid-sized archived copies was both how much has changed and how little has changed. We’re writing today about many of the same subjects that we did before and it’s clear, we’re asking many of the same questions, seeking the same information. The technology might be light years more developed, but fuel injection is still fuel injection, hydraulics is still hydraulics, things still need to be cooled, quieted, etc.

What also jumped out at me were the people – both in the industry and here at Diesel. Nearly 20 years here has sent me back through the archives any number of times and so many of the bylines were as familiar as old friends and some I knew or met somewhere along the way. Some, like company co-founder Rex Wadman, were legends and it was clear to see why. The first 20 years of Diesel Progress carry Rex’s imprint and much of his soul. Much of his writing, while perhaps not what would be seen today – “707’d into Peoria to witness the future…” – still delivers the informational goods.

All in all, the look back was fun and especially informative for the younger folks here, as it gave them some perspective on how some things that happened before they were born are still having an impact today. And how a good idea from the 1800s – the diesel engine – can still be a good idea in the 21^st century.

The second event that triggered my philosophic pondering was the opposite of fun, as we noted with sadness the untimely passing of former Diesel & Gas Turbine Publications President Rob Wilson. Rob spent 28 years here, generated nearly 500 feature stories and his fingerprints were all over the issues from 1979 into 2007.

I worked with him from 1990 to 2007 and to say I learned a lot about trade publishing would be an understatement of major proportions. Probably the greatest lesson was his insistence that everyone writing for Diesel develop their own “voice” – their own way of communicating. He didn’t want cookie-cutter coverage, but instead was looking for different perspectives which could be blended into a single, informative, readable package. And I think those who have read Diesel Progress for any amount of time notice that no two stories read exactly the same, no matter the subject matter. And that it’s a good thing.

Through each decade, Diesel Progress and Diesel & Gas Turbine Publications has been built and sustained by people like Rex, Rob, Bruce Wadman (Rex’s son), Bob Schulz, Joe Kane – people who brought their own unique talents and skills and did the job that needed doing at the time. They passed the torch to the next generation, which has included Mike Osenga and your faithful blogger. Within a few years, it will be passed yet again and Diesel Progress will likely be taken to places that I can’t yet even imagine. No, I can’t see the future, but I suspect that as long as people need information on products, technology and news involving engines and engine-powered vehicles and equipment, there will be a solid business case for Diesel Progress.

When they mark the 100^th anniversary of Diesel Progress, they’ll probably again look back and see the role that each of us played to get it to that point. To me, that’s a comforting thought because it shows that we were part of something bigger than any one of us.

And that’s enough of a place in the universe for me.