INDUSTRY ISSUE
PROMISES, PROMISES, PROMISES
It’s all very well to come up with promises, but the most important thing is to keep them. PowerTorque looks at how well some promises from exactly 20 year ago have been kept, aided by a couple of those involved over the years.
T
he promises made were by, what was then in 2002, the National Road Transport Commission (now the National Transport Commission [NTC]) about how the Performance Based Standards (PBS) system was supposed to play out over the next twenty years. This text is from an article which I published, in my role as the editor of the Commercial Vehicle Industry Association
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of Australia (CVIAA) Technical Directory, has haunted me down the years. It was written for the NTC by someone in the organisation as a taster of what the PBS would look and feel like after it was implemented. At that point in time, the idea of a PBS had been discussed for many years and was just starting to look like it would eventually get up in the next few years, and it did. For many in the industry the
scheme has been a disappointment, it has achieved some of its aims, but has not radically improved productivity across the board. PowerTorque reprints the snippets of the original story here as it appeared back in early 2002. We asked Marcus Coleman, Tiger Spider Managing Director and Bob Woodward, Australian Trucking Association Chief Engineer, to assess the accuracy of the opinions.
