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manufacturer, last week's European Transport Maintenance Council gathering in Hamburg was a very worthy and earnest affair. The one thing it lacked was commitment.
In two-and-a-half days of non-stop technical talking, the conference covered a number of weighty and topical questions. It would have been impossible to leave without sensing just how strongly the ETMC's transport engineers want to improve the industry's standards and working practices. What they lacked was urgency and decisiveness.
The conference passed no resolution whatsoever, and failed to make a single collective recommendation. It was a talking shop where nobody bought anything. The only commitment to come out of the affair was an agreement to meet again in a year's time, in Florence.
The ETMC will never be taken seriously as a pressure or lobby group if it does not start telling industry what it wants, and when. It must give the truck and component manufacturers precise instructions, otherwise nothing will ever change. It should remember that the only real, justifiable reason for creating the council in the first place was to bring about such changes.
Some members of the council seem to think that committing themselves to certain causes might be dangerous because any campaign the council would run would not have the full support of all of the membership. Of course not, no collective democratic group ever has complete unanimity. But if you don't stick your head above the parapet, no one will ever know you are there.
In one of its conference statements, the ETMC says it wants to become "the catalyst needed to finally unite the European commercial vehicle industry." If so, it must do what all catalysts do and get things fizzing. There may be the odd explosion, but that is the way you make things happen.
After last year's ETMC conference in Strasbourg Commercial Motor said that if the council wanted to be the voice of Europe's operators, it would have to show its teeth.
One year on, the new standardised international maintenance manuals launched by the council at Hamburg are its most positive move yet. It is showing some teeth at last. Now it is time to use those teeth, and actually take a bite at something.