By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

We certainly read plenty of cautionary articles in the press about scams targeting unaware consumers, but you might be surprised that marketing scams are a part of the B2B world, even the fleet industry.

First, a definition of the term “marketing scam”: an offer that is too good to be true. In this month’s column, let’s look at an advertising example:

One day a fleet, risk or procurement manager gets a cold call from a sales rep with a pitch like this: “I represent (officious business or vertical industry magazine title, probably including ‘international’ or ‘global in it,’ that you never heard of).

“Our editors are writing a series of articles on companies like yours that are achieving business success. We would like to feature your firm’s success story in our glossy magazine that goes to ‘business leaders’ around the (country or world).

“Best of all, there’s no cost to you or your company! All we ask is that you provide us with a list of your vendors, who will certainly want to show their support for your business.”

Before agreeing to this too-good-to-be-true opportunity, here are two questions to ask:

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By Mark Boada, Senior Editor

Lukas Neckermann is the managing director of Neckermann Strategic Advisors, a mobility consultancy based in London, England. He was the keynote speaker at NAFA’s International Fleet Academy in Tampa, Florida this year. Fleet Management Weekly interviewed him the day after he delivered his presentation.

You were talking about how we are in the midst of a mobility revolution. Can you please explain the basics of what is happening and why?

We are in the middle of a transformation based on three converging trends. The first trend is zero emissions, or the electrification of not just the automobile but all forms of transport, especially road transport. Second is zero accidents, which is achievable by the widespread adoption of self-driving or autonomous vehicle technology. And the third is zero ownership, which is the trend that encompasses car sharing, ride hailing, ride sharing and more broadly speaking the sharing economy.

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Business Insider

Self-driving cars might make your future commute a lot more pleasant, but they won’t eliminate traffic.

Execs like Google cofounder Sergey Brin have touted traffic reduction as one of the many benefits of having self-driving cars on the road. The idea is that autonomous cars will eliminate accidents caused by human error, a major contributor to traffic.

But experts say the vehicles’ impact on traffic will either be minimal or negative.

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Wired

With the likes of Daimler, Volvo, and Uber working on self-driving trucks, it’s no surprise that the granddaddy of autonomous vehicles, Waymo, is getting in on the big-rig action too.

Waymo (formerly the Google driverless car program, and now a standalone company under the Alphabet umbrella) is working to commercialize its technology, and today confirmed it’s exploring how its self-driving know-how can transform the trucking industry.

Self-driving technology can transport people and things much more safely than we do today and reduce the thousands of trucking-related deaths each year, Waymo said in a statement.

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The Detroit News

Former National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Mark Rosekind referred to the final years of the Obama administration as the era of Big Recall, but safety groups are concerned that the age of muscular enforcement of federal rules for auto safety may come to an end under President Donald Trump.

Obama’s second term saw record fines for automakers: General Motors Co. was forced to pay a then-record $900 million fine over its handling of vehicles with a dangerous ignition-switch defect ultimately linked to 124 deaths and hundreds of injuries.

Volkswagen Group paid $2.8 billion in criminal fines and $1.5 billion in civil penalties for programming its diesel cars to trick federal testers into believing the engines released far less pollution into the air than they do.

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Detroit Free Press

U.S. automakers should and almost certainly will ignore President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris climate agreement.

Doing otherwise isn’t just bad for life on Earth. It’s bad business. Companies rooted in science and technology should acknowledge the mountain of data showing the planet is growing warmer at an alarming rate.

The evidence that human action is involved is overwhelming, but even if it’s wrong, the only downside to lower greenhouse emissions and fossil fuel consumption is a cleaner world for our descendants, as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,  memorably pointed out in one of his campaigns.

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Fortune

A new study from Intel and the research firm Strategy Analytics claims that driverless vehicles will be behind $7 trillion worth of economic activity and new efficiencies annually by 2050.

That activity, according to the report, will include nearly $4 trillion from driverless ride-hailing and nearly $3 trillion from driverless delivery and business logistics.

The big number also includes $203 billion from new use cases for pilotless vehicles in sectors like tourism and healthcare. These previously unimagined applications could include, to cite just two examples, mobile hair salons or rolling restaurants.

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Bloomberg

Elon Musk’s perpetual joker grin is probably a little wider today. The Chevrolet Bolt, the proletariat machine that beat his nascent Model 3 to market by the better part of a year, is, well, not bolting at all.

Creeping would be a better word.

After six months on the market, only 6,529 Bolts have found their way out of dealerships and into the wild. That’s far less than sales of the all-electric Nissan Leaf and either of the existing Tesla models over the same period.

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By Mark Boada, Senior Editor

At the SmartDriving Summit at Princeton University this past month, host Professor Alain Kornhauser asked why Americans weren’t buying more hybrid vehicles: “Their fuel efficiency and their resale values are better, so where are all the hybrids?”

The question is justified. Since they were introduced into the U.S. market in 1999, hybrid vehicles have accounted for a bit more than 2 percent of the passenger cars sold. This is despite the fact that for the consumer who keeps his or her new car for 6.5 years (the national average), a hybrid makes financial sense. Its better fuel economy can save the owner thousands of dollars over that period compared to a gasoline-fueled car, and hybrids retain their value better when resold. Combined, these factors more than offset a hybrid’s higher initial price.

But for sedan fleets, it’s a different story.

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The Economist

When an American policeman pulled over a Volkswagen (VW) Jetta in 2013, he suspected that the array of pipes sticking out of the back of the car and the grey box and portable generator in the vehicle were a sign of something fishy.

He was right.

The West Virginia University researchers inside the car had nothing to hide. But the tests they were conducting on the exhaust fumes, meant to prove the cleanliness of modern diesel engines, uncovered one of the biggest and boldest frauds in corporate history.

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