I seem to spend a lot of time figuring out acronyms. I have a love/hate relationship with them.
I’m one of those people that likes to skip to the end of a report, read the conclusions and then go back and figure out why the report authors reached them. Acronyms usually are only defined at the beginning of a report, and then used ad nauseam throughout. So, if you start at the end, you have to guess at them.
The holy grail of “acronymism,” if I can coin a term, is to become the acronym. Companies like 3M and IBM became so ubiquitous that they just assumed their actual names were irrelevant. There is a tad bit of arrogance in making that leap — the assumption that everyone knows who you are so you can rebrand to the abbreviated letters. At least everyone who matters. And if they don’t, they should. Right?
Reports on technologies are filled with acronyms. In the same way that a company aims to rebrand, authors go to extremes to brand a topic. New technologies are fertile ground for claiming authorship of the industry-accepted acronym for a technology.
I took a stab at this back in 2018 trying to differentiate commercial battery electric vehicles from automotive and light-duty electric vehicles. I proposed the term CBEV in NACFE’s first report on electric trucks, Electric Trucks, Where They Make Sense. CBEV has had a few adopters, but it is just one of a growing list of competing acronyms.
CALSTART has offered up MHD ZET, for medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission truck. This seems to be a loophole in the TLA rule. You know, three-letter acronym. Perhaps it’s okay to make a six-letter acronym into two three-letter ones. At least the math works.
In my presentations at the 2022 ATA TMC, (yep, CALSTART is not alone in six letter bifurcated acronyms, the American Trucking Associations’ Technology and Maintenance Council was there first), I stated that the common defining element of zero-emission trucks was that electric motors power the wheels. So, in essence, whether a hybrid, a fuel cell, a battery or combinations of them are initiating the energy, what moves the truck ultimately is electricity. Unfortunately, the acronym ET, for electric truck, was already taken some time ago by Stephen Spielberg.
