FleetManagementWeekly AmeriFleet
March 21, 2017

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Editor's Analysis & Top Industry News


A Great Time at The Work Truck Show!

We were in Indianapolis last week for The Work Truck Show, where we saw some old friends and met some new ones – learning a lot and having fun all the while.

For us, one of the greatest benefits of attending industry events is the ability to capture a bunch of new video interview content, and this week we feature our first two interviews from Work Truck: Tiago Castro on how Nissan is making a huge push into the Commercial Vehicle space; and Tucker Perkins from PERC on how successful propane has been in the work truck space.

Look for more new video interviews in upcoming issues, and don’t forget to check in at FleetManagementWeekly.com for daily updates.

Ted Roberts
President


Thought Leadership

Fleet Marketing – Guiding principles for fleet providers to improve marketing and increase sales.

Fleet Asset Management – Best practices for work truck management.

Globally Speaking — Perspectives on the Multinational Fleets

Customer Driven — Engage your organization to create customer loyalty, trust and superior servic

On Fleet Driver Management Learn ways to save money on your fleet’s collision repair costs.

Safety & Risk — Impactful driver safety and risk management tools and techniques.

The Fleet CX Toolbox – Solid steps to implementing and improving fleet customer experience.

BIG Data. BIG Results. BIG Future–  Harnessing big data to achieve big results using cutting edge technology.

Talent Management – Smart guidelines to help you manage the talent in your workplace.


VIDEO: Nissan Makes a Big Push in the Commercial Vehicle Space

Nissan is making a big push into the commercial vehicle space – and they’re hoping to entice fleet managers and FMCs with a full lineup of trucks and vans offering a 5-year 100,000-mile warranty.

WATCH the video to learn more. EMAIL Gary Van Orden for more info on Nissan Commercial Vehicles.



VIDEO: Work Trucks and Propane

  A Good Year for Propane
 

Propane is definitely a fuel for work trucks — and 2016 was quite a good year for propane!


VIDEO: The One Second Advantage
  Driving in the Rain
 

Smart tips for driving in the rain from Driving Dynamics — a one-second advantage can make a world of difference.





The Fleet Spot


Register Today for WIFM Webinar: Quality of Life

When: March 29, 2017 2:00
Register now!

Join WIFM and Cynthia Thurlow for this one hour webinar focused on quality of life issues facing professional women today. All are welcomed to join.

Are you a successful woman who is tired of being tired? Are you overwhelmed with responsibilities to family and work and don’t have sufficient time to take care of yourself, or even sleep well? Are you frustrated with weight gain and food cravings that you have not dealt with before?

It can be confusing to make sense of all the conflicting advice you hear from well-meaning family and friends on the internet or in magazine articles.

READ MORE

Analytics and Driver Experience at the Heart of LeasePlan’s New Technological Enhancements

LeasePlan USA announces enhancements to fleet technology.

LeasePlan USA is bringing new enhancements to ePlan, the online fleet management tool that helps companies gain more control over their fleets.

With a streamlined new interface, featuring an easy-to-use wizard and expanded comparison parameters, LeasePlan’s new Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) tool helps lessees decide which vehicles to include in their fleet. The tool offers powerful decision-making information, such as market value depreciation and projected maintenance expenses, using LeasePlan’s proven proprietary models.

READ MORE

NADA Used Car Guide Industry Update

In a reversal of what typically occurs in February, wholesale prices of used vehicles up to eight years old fell substantially last month, dropping 1.6% compared to January.

The drop was counter to the 1% increase expected for the month and marked just the second time in the past 20 years prices fell in February (last years’ scant 0.2% being the other instance).

READ THE FULL REPORT

fleetcompetence Group Expands Team for International Fleet Consulting

The fleet consulting specialist Tobias Kern will join the fleetcompetence Group as managing partner for the international fleet consulting business.

The international fleet consulting company fleetcompetence welcomes Tobias Kern, an expert in global fleet consulting. In his role as Managing Partner he will be in charge of leading and expanding the international consulting business within the Group.

Tobias Kern has a long-standing history in the automotive industry for more than a decade.

READ MORE

Safety & Risk

“One-hundred deaths every day should outrage us. Why are we O.K. with this? Complacency is killing us.”

By Art Liggio, President, Driving Dynamics

According to a recent report by the National Safety Council, for the first time in 10 years there were more than 40,000 traffic fatalities in the United States. This 2016 statistic represents a 6 percent increase over 2015 and sadly, 2015’s increase in fatalities was 7.2 percent above 2014. Another sobering fact related to 2015 is that the increase that year was the largest percentage increase in nearly 50 years.

Many articles seem to suggest that a contributing factor to this upward trend is that Americans are driving more than in previous years. On the surface this seems logical, however, when you look at further analyses compiled by NHTSA, which includes the equalizing measurement of fatality crashes per million miles, the story does not get any better.

READ MORE

 
Customer Driven

Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening my ax.”

By Laura Jozwiak, Senior Vice President of Sales and Client Relations, Wheels, Inc.

This quote helps to set the stage for three strategies that I feel are critical in order to achieve and deliver results: Preparation, effort, focus. We achieve our results when we are prepared, put forth the effort and focus on our vision. Allow me to explain…

PREPARATION
In my opinion, J.J. Watt is a great example of someone who achieved great results by being prepared. If you are not familiar with J.J. Watt he is an NFL defensive end for the Houston Texans. He has a reputation for being a bit of a maniac regarding his game-day preparations; and he has produced results because of it. He received the Associated Press NFL Defensive Player of the Year Award three times in his first five seasons. In 2014, he became the first player in NFL history to record two 20+ sack seasons in a career.

Watt once said, “Someone has to be the best, it might as well be me.” But in order to be the best, he knew he had to prepare.

READ MORE

 
Fuel Cell Vehicles

The Detroit Bureau

During a visit to Detroit last week, President Donald Trump all but promised the auto industry his administration will roll back the tough 54.5 mpg federal mileage standard set to go into effect in 2025.

Yet while some manufacturers, especially Detroit’s Big Three, issued a collective sigh of relief, others insisted such a move wouldn’t make much, if any, difference in their long-term plans. That includes Honda, whose CEO recently emphasized his commitment to generating two-thirds of the maker’s sales from electrified powertrains by 2030.

“Electric” doesn’t necessarily mean “battery,” however, and Honda has become one of the biggest proponents of fuel-cell technology, the Japanese maker recently becoming the third manufacturer to start marketing a hydrogen-powered car in the U.S. market.

READ MORE









Fleet Trends & Issues


Can Trump Uncork Vehicle Emissions? It Won’t Be Easy

Wired

For eight years, the message from Washington to automakers has been clear: Build greener cars. Today, the message changed.

President Trump announced, in a meeting with automakers in Detroit, that he wants the EPA to review its tailpipe emissions standards for model years 2022 through 2025, standards the Obama administration attempted to make permanent just before Trump’s inauguration in January.

But all is not lost. An EPA review of those rules will take months, and changing them will require providing robust evidence that the Obama-era regulation will adversely effect automakers and the US economy, and that reversing it will not adversely effect the environment.

READ MORE

Leaked Internal Uber Documents Show Rocky Self-Driving Car Progress

TechCrunch

New internal Uber documents leaked to Recode detail the company’s progress toward realizing its dream of a fleet of vehicles entirely devoid of pesky human drivers.

As those files reveal, Uber’s month-over-month metrics aren’t exactly a steady line of progress, more a jerky sort of stumbling toward its goal of self-driving reliability. And as Uber’s court battle with Google over autonomous car tech begins, that visual is a particularly apt metaphor.

Uber’s self driving fleet, spread across Pennsylvania, California and Arizona, is driving more miles than ever, but its vehicles aren’t improving in a steady way on measurements of rider experience.

READ MORE

The Road Ahead: Self-Driving Cars on the Brink of a Revolution in California

The Guardian

Autonomous vehicles are already a common sight on the streets of Silicon Valley, an international hub for self-driving technology.

But this month, California set the stage for the next phase of innovation that could dramatically alter transportation and mobility across the globe.

The state has proposed regulations to allow fully autonomous vehicles to drive on public roads – meaning empty cars with no steering wheels and no backup driver inside.

READ MORE

Clark County to Spend $7.5 Million to Update Aviation Department’s Vehicle Fleet

Las Vegas Review-Journal

The Clark County Department of Aviation will spend $7.5 million over the next three years to replace and modernize its equipment and fleet of vans, pickups and SUVs.

In total, the department will purchase about 250 new vehicles. Around the same number of vehicles from the airport’s current fleet of 350 vehicles will be retired and auctioned over the same time.

The County Commission approved the purchases last month and new vehicles are already being acquired from multiple automotive dealerships inside Clark County, including Findlay Chevrolet and Ford Country.

READ MORE

Vehicles and Technology

Wired

Excellent news for the gas-sipping, headlight-blinking, gossipy autos among us.

Cadillac’s flagship 2017 CTS sedan will talk to other cars. Well, other 2017 Cadillac CTS sedans, but it’s a start. If the government gets its way, all cars will talk to each other one day soon.

Engineers call the technology vehicle to vehicle communication. General Motors and Uncle Sam call it the future of automotive safety in a country where more than 32,000 people died in collisions last year.

READ MORE

 
Talent Management

By Mike Cieri, MSIR, Vice President of Mardac Consultants

Many organizational conflicts revolve around the differences that we see in the facts

Disagreements between people on what the facts are, are inevitable. Nevertheless, there is a common belief that “facts are facts.” When a dispute occurs, it should be simple to identify the “real” facts, accept them, act accordingly, and thus settle any differences. Yet the “facts” are not always that simple.

Many organizational conflicts revolve around the differences that we see in the facts. What lens are we looking through? What’s our perception?

Our perception is formed through basic characteristics that are inborn and/or that greatly affect how we are socialized. For example; Age, Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Physical Abilities/Qualities, Intellect, and Sexual/Affectional Orientation. These are the characteristics that we are born with, they are at our core. The secondary dimension in forming our perception are those characteristics that are acquired and can modify throughout our life.

READ MORE

 
Drowsy Driving Kills

The New York Times

It’s something that many of us have experienced while driving, though we may not like to admit it.

It’s called a microsleep, a brief state of drowsy unconsciousness that can happen even if your eyes remain open.

Drowsy driving kills. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drowsy driving caused 824 deaths in 2015, the last year for which figures are available.

Several manufacturers, including Audi, Mercedes and Volvo, currently offer drowsiness detection systems that monitor a vehicle’s movements, such as steering wheel angle, lane deviation, time driven and road conditions.

READ MORE








Fleet Management Resources
 
AFLA – Automotive Fleet & Leasing Association
Providing the advanced forum for corporate fleet professionals to network with industry leaders.
The CEI Group Inc.
CEI is North America’s largest provider of fully integrated fleet accident management, driver safety and risk management services.
NAFA Fleet Management Association
NAFA is the association for the diverse vehicle fleet management profession regardless of organizational type, geographic location, or fleet composition.
AmeriFleet
Offering a nationwide vehicle delivery and relocation service; serving the corporate and commercial fleet industry.
Donlen
Since 1965, Donlen has been the fleet management industry’s leading provider of comprehensive, integrated financing and asset management solutions — and that spirit of innovation continues today.
PARS
PARS' mission is to provide you with high-quality service at competitive prices for all of your transportation needs.
ARI
Driven fleet professionals. Driving results.
Driving Dynamics
Driving Dynamics was established to help corporate fleet drivers develop expert, safe driving skills using proven, advanced driving techniques.
Wheels, Inc.
First in fleet for 76 years. Wheels helps you build tomorrow’s fleet today.



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