In May, Ford announced that it was eliminating most of the sedans from its product lineup next year, leaving it to focus more on its commercial truck business, where it is the U.S. market leader.

The announcement put Fleet Management Weekly’s interview at the Work Truck Show in Indianapolis, Indiana in March with John Ruppert, Ford’s general manager for commercial sales and marketing, in a different perspective.

In the interview, Ruppert says, “The commercial market is a tremendously important business for us. It has been. You can go back a hundred years. In fact last year we celebrated a hundred years of being in the truck business. It was a Model TT, purpose-built truck, that we originally built in 1917, so for a hundred years, we’ve been selling trucks. Obviously, as time has gone along, it’s not just trucks. It’s trucks and vans. If you pay particular attention to the commercial segment, you’ll notice that the largest segment of the industry is actually vans. The second largest is trucks. The van products will serve a very, very important part of our portfolio as we go forward.”

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By Clay Siegert, Chief Operating Officer, XL

If you were asked to rank the following green fleet vehicles in order of their net CO2 emissions savings over standard, gas-powered vehicles, from highest reducing to least reducing, how would you order them?

1. Plug-in Hybrid Electric Truck (PHEV)
2. Hybrid Electric Truck (HEV)
3. Battery Electric Sedan (BEV)

(Hint: If you guessed the order above, you’d be right.)

Surprising? Not when you look at the full picture of relative net CO2 emissions.

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[Editor’s note: Mark Boada] — A Plea from a Teen on Distracted Driving

We’ve heard for years now about the scourge of distracted driving, but it’s not often that we hear it from a teenager, as in this essay by 14-year-old Neleh Vigneau Sargeant. As you read her remarkable plea, keep in mind the following:

• Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people 15 to 20 years old.
• According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, not teens but drivers aged 30 to 39 show the highest rate of cell phone distraction in fatal crashes.
• Parents set the example: teens whose parents drive distracted are two to four times as likely to drive distracted as teens whose parents do not.

By: Neleh Vigneau Sargeant, Grade 9, Newbridge Academy

Behavioural psychologist David Strayer claims that talking on a cell phone is as bad as drunk driving because you are four times more likely to be in a crash.

I remembered this fact as I sat on my school’s hockey team bus, watching the bus driver take a call while driving with 15 of my teammates aboard. The driver looked to be in his 30s and seemed to be very comfortable splitting his attention between the road and his phone, while the other passengers didn’t even notice the dangerous situation. I knew that I should speak up and regret that I didn’t, but this experience led me to look further into distracted driving, in particular, whether skill levels while multi-tasking behind the wheel differ by generations.

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Bloomberg

There’s no shortage of investment, from both tech and automobile companies in developing self-driving cars, but even the best ideas can get only so far without a business model.

Unlike Alphabet’s Waymo, ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft, and Tesla, incumbent automakers may be slower to innovate and change but have decades of experience, and know how to play nice with regulators.

Read the article at Bloomberg.

Forbes

At the request of the President, the U.S. Department of Commerce began an investigation into whether auto imports “are weakening our internal economy and may impair the national security.”

The U.S. imported over $190bn in autos in 2017; if the Trump administration hits a large fraction of those imports with tariffs there is the potential for a very sizeable retaliatory backlash.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), said, “There’s no rational person that could think that we have a national security issue with auto manufacturing.”

Read the article at Forbes.

The Detroit Bureau

As more and more consumers seem to be interested in buying electric vehicles, a new study by Nature Energy suggests that dealers are not including electric vehicles into their sales conversations and are steering buyers towards combustion engine vehicles.

Consumer Reports conducted a study in 2014 that showed 50 out of 85 dealerships across the U.S. discouraged secret shoppers from purchasing EVs, and answered questions incorrectly about topics ranging from incentives to warranties to charging times.

Read the article at The Detroit Bureau.

Detroit Free Press

As vehicle connectivity continues to evolve, the risk of widespread cyberattacks increases dramatically. Copying code from vehicle fobs is easy and thieves can do it from outside your home, motel, or office, unless you put your fob in a metal container, such as a coffee can.

This is the reality of a wireless, connected world where car doors lock with a click and a chirp, where children in the backseat stream videos, where back-up cameras make parking easy, where driver assist prevents accidents and companies can update software technology remotely.

“Really, some cyber experts don’t go to sleep without putting their key into a metal container,” said Moshe Shlisel, a veteran of the Israeli Air Force and now CEO of GuardKnox Cyber Technologies. “It’s called a Faraday Cage. You block the electromagnetic field.”

Read the article at Detroit Free Press.

Wired

Buying or leasing a car are the traditional options for car ownership, but now app-based subscriptions—think car sharing that’s paid by the month, not the hour—are vying for consumers who fall between Uber addicts and car owners.

Car sharing is projected to grow globally from 5.8 million users in 2015 to 35 million by 2021.

“This takes a painful process—buying, financing, and maintaining a car—and turns it into a frictionless experience,” says T. J. Rylander, a VC at Next47. It’s the on-demand way: all the utility of ownership, none of the hassle.

Read the article at Wired.

Daily Express

The European Commission wants it to be mandatry that all new cars to be fitted with eleven safety features by 2021 in bold new plans. Included in the proposal is autonomous emergency braking (AEB), lane-keep assistance and fatigue monitoring systems.

It is believed that the new measures could save around 7,300 lives over the next decade and 38,900 serious injuries.

The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) executive direction, David Davies, has said that the new rules would be a “free lunch” for the Government as they would “not require Government spending.”

Read the article at Daily Express.

Bloomberg

In 2010, a little known Chinese billionaire named Li Shufu, and his company Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. bought struggling Volvo from Ford – by the end of this year the company will have introduced nine models, essentially replacing its entire product lineup.

Hakan Samuelsson became the chief executive officer of Volvo Car Group in 2012, and since then Volvo has built an engine plant and two vehicle assembly factories in China, plus another assembly facility in South Carolina, while expanding research and development centers in Sweden and California.

“It’s not that they came with a bag of money; actually the opposite. The entire turnaround of Volvo has been financed by Volvo’s cash flow. They left us alone and had the patience as an investor not to take our money but to reinvest it in a new product portfolio. We were close to being dead in 2010. And here we are,” said Lex Kerssemakers, a top Volvo executive under both Ford and Geely.

Read the article at Bloomberg.