SAE STANDARDS NEWS

I've grown to appreciate the fact that readers of this column are well-versed in acronymic discourse. But that doesn't make swimming in the ever-deeper ‘alphabet soup’ less daunting. The mobility industry and its government and academic partners seem to add new acronyms daily to the already daunting list, putting SAE International in the center of the vortex.

It's our duty to help our industry partners keep pace with new organizations of all sizes that prefer to be labeled in this fashion. Sometimes this leads to humor. Editor-in-chief Lindsay Brooke jokes about a reporting visit he made to TARDEC. Once spelled out as the U.S. Army's Tank and Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, the huge facility in Warren, Michigan, now is officially the GVSC-the Ground Vehicle Systems Center. It's part of CCDC, the Combat Capabilities Development Command. In his interview with Army vehicle engineers, Brooke came under intense acronym-fire, with arcane-to-civilians abbreviations hitting him as furiously as rounds from an LMG (light machine gun) mounted on an LAV (light armored vehicle).