A case can be made that the IoT started in the mid 1970s, when faculty members of the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department installed microswitches in a Coke machine that sensed how many bottles were in each column in the machine and whether they were cold, based on how long ago they had been loaded. Now, of course, the IoT is much larger and more sophisticated, and IHS Markit predicts that the IoT will consist of 30.7 billion objects by 2020.
But what does this have to do with trucking? For starters, the electronic logging devices (ELDs) mandated for every truck beginning next month are part of the Internet of Things—ELDs that connect to the truck’s engine, monitor Hours of Service, and automatically report back are by definition part of the IoT.
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