“I have seen the future – and it works,” observed American social commentator Upton Sinclair almost 100 years ago, after a visit to post-revolutionary Russia. At various points over the past 20 years, similar sentiments have echoed repeatedly through the pages of Automotive Logistics, as successive technologies have redefined the art of the possible.

Sinclair’s enthusiasm about communist Russia, as we now know, was misplaced. And likewise, in the world’s automotive supply chains, there has been a more sober reassessment of the real impact of many of these supposedly revolutionary advances.

That isn’t to say that the technologies themselves don’t work, nor is it to say that those same technologies haven’t delivered genuine supply chain transformations in other industries.