EDITORIAL: ITF Summit 2026: Engineering resilience

I wanted to return to the topic from last month's column, my visit to the annual Summit of the International Transport Forum, the world's largest gathering of transport ministers and a global transport policy event, in Leipzig, Germany. Since there wasn't a lot of news directly related to automotive engineering news, I wanted to share a bit from this high-level event through editorial privilege. It was interesting to hear from some of the people in charge around the world as they shared their views on our current transportation situation and what they are doing to affect the future.

At a panel on EV expansion, for example, the people in the room seemed to agree that the commercial EV industry has moved beyond proving the viability of battery-electric trucks and is shifting focus to overcoming infrastructure, regulatory, and systems integration challenges that continue to limit large-scale deployment. Even better, for those of us who've been listening to the arguments for and against electric vehicles for multiple decades now, representatives from across the industry - including logistics providers, vehicle manufacturers, charging companies, and policy groups - said that zero-emission freight transport has become a business strategy today, more so than any sort of sustainability effort as it might have been in years past. In the same vein, what might have been a battery-electric transport pilot program in 2016 can today be integrated into an organization's core freight operations.