If It Isn’t Broken, do I really Need to Get Out More?

David Smith, Transport Manager at Thomas Bell & Sons Ltd, on why 2026 is the year to make time for the shows — even if your kit is doing the job.

Every transport manager I know lives by a version of the same rule. If it isn’t broken, leave it alone. There’s a fleet to run, drivers to manage, deliveries to land, and the phone doesn’t stop. You don’t have time to chase upgrades for the sake of upgrades.

I’ve been on that side of the fence for a long time, and I’ll still defend it. The kit we had was doing the job. The footage came off when we needed it. The operation rolled on. No serious complaints, no looming problem to solve. By any sensible measure, fine.

What I hadn’t appreciated and I’ll admit this freely, is how far the software and the hardware around me had moved on while I had my head down running the fleet. Not in small steps. In quite considerable ones. The AI side of things in particular has come on at a pace that, if you’re not actively looking, simply happens around you while you’re busy doing the day job.

The supplier who didn’t give up on me

Credit where credit’s due. Fleet Focus stayed in touch with me through years of polite “not just now.” They never made me feel awkward for being on the older systems. They never stopped supporting what I had. But they also never quite let the conversation close, and eventually I gave them the half-hour I’d not given them for far too long.

That half-hour was the eye-opener. Not because anyone tried to sell me something… they didn’t… but because I genuinely hadn’t realised how much had become possible. What you can now see about your drivers’ working day, in something close to real time. What the AI side of the platform can flag, group and put in front of you without you having to go digging for it. The gap between what I’d assumed was state of the art and what actually is state of the art was bigger than I’d ever imagined, if you’d asked me cold.

I’d put the moral of that small story like this: a good supplier doesn’t push you when you’re not ready, but they don’t give up on you either. And it’s worth, every so often, letting them show you what’s changed. You don’t know what you don’t know.

2026 is the year to look

This is where I’d push my peers. The Road Transport Expo at Stoneleigh — 30 June to 2 July — is, in my opinion, the must-attend show of the year. I don’t say that as a matter of habit. I say it because 2026 genuinely feels like one of those unusual year in the industry. The volume of updates, modifications and out-and-out new developments arriving in my email inbox in the same twelve-month window is not normal. Software, hardware, AI, telematics, vehicle technology — all of it shifting at once.

If you only get to one show this year, get to that one. And if you don’t — fair enough, time is time — but don’t kid yourself that you’ll catch up in the trade press later. The thing about not going to a show like this in a year like this isn’t that you’ll miss it and know you missed it. It’s that you’ll miss it and very likely never realise quite what you missed.

I’m booked and I’m grateful to Fleet Focus that they didn’t give up on me!

David Smith is Transport Manager at Thomas Bell & Sons Ltd, a long-established North Lincolnshire haulier operating a mixed fleet of rigid and articulated vehicles.

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Graham Plummer

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