Digitalization is increasingly transforming mechanical engineering and manufacturing technologies, bringing with it not only unparalleled control and flexibility over production systems but so much more.

In 2017, there's more variety to be found under the hood of a car than ever. Electric, hybrid and internal combustion engines all sit next to a range of transmission types, creating an ever-increasingly complex evolutionary web of technology choices for what we put into our automobiles. But every evolutionary tree has a few dead end branches that ended up never going anywhere.

I was invited by Tom Astrene of TLT to write a response to the July 2010 TLT article (Ref. 1). My rebuttal — “In Search of a Fatigue Limit: A Critique of ISO Standard 281:2007” — was published in Tribology and Lubrication Engineering, TLT, August 2010 edition (Ref. 10). While this article is also available online, I will attempt to summarize the essence of my response.