andrew j i have lived in HX most my life so most probably know people you know. The part i was making about new reg's already exists tier IIII. if you were to look at big trucks over 10,000kg Hyster and Taylor Both US companies even tho Hyster produce in Europe there big truck sales do well in US and Taylor who's majority of sales are in US are in the top three manufactures in the world. even tho these sales might be small compared to small trucks there is still quite a lot of sales going on in these in the US.

I think the major problem with European manufactures is their trucks are to complicated. I know from over here that people are talking about more electric trucks but in reality it is a much more expensive way of doing this because of spare battier's ect.

linde and toyota have both got electric trucks at 5,000kg but when these are compared to there diesel counterparts the are up to 30% more to purchase. I do think the chines will now start to dominate the forklift market over years to come and will in time over take the top four of Toyota , Linde, NACCO and Junghienric and CAT will pull out of lift trucks all together they are practically out now so they might as well just concentrate on there core business which is construction machinery. Komatsu will also follow CAT out of lift trucks and so will Hyundai. KION is in total a total mess not knowing where to go to next and the new TCM Nissan company will just look around and say they have capital to invest but wont spend any of it.

If the US go down the all electric route they will find them self's unable to compete at a economical way the US grid needs Billions of dollars to be spent on this to bring it up to Scratch and to look to electric trucks as the future will not help because they will not be able to produce and distribute the electricity needed.

people say this way is the way the market is going to go and to be fair 90% of the top management agree that by 2020 most trucks sold will be electric powered , the point they don't seem to understand is that most countries don't have the facilities to deliver the power source that would be needed to do this. And the extra cost of spare batteries will not make this economical.

The amount of rare earth materials that have to go into a new electric forklift is much higher than most people understand and these materials are being sought after by more and more industries such as mobile phones tablet computers ect. like most things when you start to see prices rise because the components are to expensive people will look to other way's of doing this.