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Daimler AG and its joint-venture partner, China’s Beiqi Foton Motor Co., said they will build a $166 million plant with the capacity to make as many as 45,000 engines a year for its trucks to serve the fast-growing Chinese market.

One of the letters to the editor of your publication written by a safety manager recently did an excellent job of making our point about “harassment” and electronic onboard recorders, or EOBRs.

Highway safety is one of the trucking industry’s top priorities, and we have long supported the industry’s efforts to employ technology in enhancing the safety of our employees’ workplace and the safety of everyone who shares our nation’s highways.

The House approved a bill on June 29 that would block any federal mandate requiring the use of electronic onboard recorders on vehicles, including a regulation included in the highway funding legislation President Obama was expected to sign late last week.

The House on Friday passed a transportation spending measure that would block rules requiring electronic onboard recorders on trucks.

Those in our industry can make whatever excuses they want for not using EOBRs. The bottom line is they haven’t wrapped their minds around how to make money legally. I mean, they might as well be bootlegging whiskey. It’s the same damn thing.

We live in an age of electronic information. Computers, the Internet, iPhones, iPads, GPS . . . all these technological wonders work to make our lives easier, reduce paperwork and give us all more time to do other things.

After carefully weighing the pros and cons in the sometimes overheated debate over whether the federal government should mandate electronic logging devices in heavy-duty trucks, we unequivocally support a requirement for electronic logging to monitor hours-of-service compliance.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has formally withdrawn its regulation that would have mandated electronic onboard recorders for some carriers.