Every now and again, something comes along that's so simple, so straightforward, and yet so important, that it just boggles when you realize that no one thought of it before. This time around, it's the Checkpoint.
It's a piece of plastic, three inches long, and it fits over the wheel nut on a truck tire. The first time I saw some of them on a truck, I thought they were purely decorative, like little neon-colored flags.
But they're not. Rather, loose wheel nuts are a serious problem on any vehicle, but especially on one this big. And while I'm sure engineers have been working on sensors and computers to tackle the problem, someone got the bright idea to stick a little plastic flag on each wheel nut, and if the point of the flag isn't pointing in exactly the same direction it was yesterday, then that wheel nut has backed off.
Simple bloody genius.
