Slippery when wrapped in plastic

Photos: California Highway Patrol.

A poorly designed roof rack turned a Toyota Tundra bakkie into a V8 sosatie and reminded contractors everywhere to not just strap down the load, but also prevent front or back movement.
Photos from a widely reported "unsecured load incident" in the small city of Westminster in California on November 4, show how close the driver and passenger in the Tundra came to being brained by the beams turned battering rams.

Emergency responders on the scene cited a witness who said the driver in the Chevrolet braked for the Tundra and the beams, wrapped in slippery plastic, shot forward.

Driving licence in North Korea both the easiest and hardest

A traffic warden awaits vehicles in Pyongyang, North Korea. - NK News, May 2010.

North Korea is both the world's toughest and easiest place to be a truck driver.

The tough bit happens in the cities, where it takes four years of study to get a first class driver's licence.

Training starts with a year of study to get the lowest, fourth class licence. This is either done at a military school as part of a 17-year-old conscript's five years military service, or at a provincial training ground for private drivers.

New mega-bridges in Africa

One of the pylons of the Msikaba bridge under construction.

Two big bridges that promise to make drivers' jobs easier in Africa are both a little closer to their opening dates.

The first is near Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape, where the Msikaba Bridge will take traffic over a gorge that is 194 metres deep as part of long-delayed plans to shorten the tolled N2 highway between Durban and East London.

This cable-stay bridge will hang from giant pylons that tower 128m above the landscape and is 70% complete. SANRAL hopes to open it in 2029... seven years after the first opening date was announced.

The air up there

Did you know altitude makes a refrigerated container, or "reefer" run a little hotter?

The higher the altitude, the lower the atmospheric pressure, which affects the compressor chilling the reefer. This means a reefer unit set at -25°C at sea-level in Cape Town or eThekwini may only reach -18°C to -20°C in Johannesburg under load.

Arriving with the load a few degrees Celsius over the specified miminum temperature will see the load rejected.

Crunch time for apple exports

Reefers tapping power of the generators Agbiz installed at Cape Town port.

Container drivers and fruit farmers in Western Cape are now waiting to see if this year will be better than the costly 25/26 fruit export season, when some 1,688 reefers got delayed in Cape Town.

This resulted in a lot of expedited work for container drivers. Fruit exporters reportedly spent over R135 million to double the container volume sent to Gquberha harbour. 

Fiction: About them underwater aliens

Dear you 

My letter about the beached whales raised more questions than answers so I'm writing this to warn you: Stay away! 

I get that making contact with the few thousand zombies who made their home in the Mariana Trench would be world changing, but trust me all you still-breathing people, coming here will not end well for you, or your equipment.

Your drones and diving bells will fail because the old reptiles don't want contact; and your divers will die because we do.

Two different paths for electric truck buyers

Watch this Huwaei electric truck port in Beichuan can dispense up to 800,000 kWh. 

The giant BYD company from China and the tiny Edison Motors company from Canada offer two different plans for diesel truck owners looking to go electric.

The engineers at the giant BYD company aim their plan at fleet buyers and provide the entire electric ecosystem supporting electric trucks, from finance, to battery banks for 1,5 MegaWatt chargers, to different sized trucks and vans.

This system has been proven for trucks of all sizes in China, from vans to dryage trucks to a fleet of electric coal trucks served by a giant electric truck charging port in Beichuan, which is able to dispense up to 800,000 kiloWatt-hours to waiting trucks.