By Mike Quimby, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Element Fleet Management

For college basketball fans, this month means only one thing – March Madness. The tournament determines the national champions of college basketball, but to get there the teams have to make the Final Four. To make it that far, each team needs to stay in the game. Like the coaches and players, it’s critical that managers actively work to keep their company’s fleet in the game.

Check out our strategies for ensuring your fleet goes the distance:

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Nationally renowned safety expert David Wallace will be the featured speaker at The CEI Group Inc.’s booth at the NAFA Institute and Exposition in Austin, TX, next month.

Mr. Wallace, an assistant prosecutor and pioneer in traffic safety, founded one of the country’s first Traffic Safety Resource Prosecutor programs. He will speak on “The Four Steps to Creating a Traffic Safety Culture at Work” at 11 am on both Wednesday, April 20^st, and Thursday April 21^nd at CEI’s Booth # 501, and will be available to meet and greet visitors and answer questions before and after his talk. Mr. Wallace is affiliated with the Justice Speakers Institute.

CEI will be stressing throughout the event that fleets can reduce their accident rates by as much as 35% and save millions of dollars year with the right safety culture and systems that focus on changing driver behavior.

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The Situation: Lease vs. Reimbursement

Wheels client, Healthpoint Biotherapeutics, was acquired by Smith & Nephew Advanced Wound Management (AWM) in 2012. The two companies approached its fleet programs very differently. Healthpoint Biotherapeutics utilized a leasing program and Smith & Nephew AWM operated a Fixed and Variable Rate (FAVR) reimbursement program managed by a third party.

Faced with combining the two programs, Smith & Nephew AWM wanted to retain the positive attributes of both. With a lease program, the company was able to track maintenance costs, monitor fuel consumption and manage driver and vehicle safety. The reimbursement plan offered employees vehicle choice based on their needs and situation. However, the reimbursement program lacked safety and legal insights required in a world where negligent entrustment is a major concern.

With safety, risk mitigation and driver satisfaction all priorities for Smith & Nephew AWM along with better program control, Wheels offered a new and different solution—lease and reimbursement from a single provider.

Read the Case Study to learn how the program was implemented, accepted by the drivers and has offered substantial cost savings to the client.

The Detroit News

Wall Street analysts gathered Tuesday for an industry forum ahead of the New York auto show cast doubt on the near-term viability of self-driving cars and dismissed speculation that ride-sharing services and autonomous vehicles would hurt profitability of the U.S. auto industry.

“In a shared/autonomous world, we’re actually driving more, because there’s many trips where there is no passenger. That’s the whole point of sharing,” UBS Auto Analyst Colin Langan said during a panel discussion at the NADA/J.D. Power Automotive Forum.

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Tech Times

There are both state and federal incentives for purchasing an electric vehicle.

However, some states are more equipped to accommodate EV owners than others. That being said, the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs recently compiled a list of the most electric car-friendly cities in the United States, with Portland taking the top spot. Surprised?

Rounding out the top five spots is Washington, D.C., New York City, Baltimore and Denver. The bottom half of the top 10 spots on the list went to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin and San Francisco. While California counts two cities within the top 10, we were surprised that neither cracked the top five spots.

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CleanTechnica

The mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, has announced a plan to cut city vehicle fleet greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% by the year 2025 through the use of electric vehicles and biodiesel.

The plans were revealed at the recent Climate Leadership Conference in Seattle, where Murray also revealed his intent to increase electric vehicle (EV) presence in the city by 15,000 vehicles by 2025 — with city fleet EV increases playing a part.

Currently Seattle gets the vast majority of its electricity from hydroelectric generation sources. As a result, if the city wants to notably cut greenhouse gas emissions, it will need to do so mostly in the transportation sector.

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eDriving, a leading provider of online driver education in the U.S. with more than 10 million customers to date, has acquired Interactive Driving Systems, a renowned global provider of fleet driver safety management solutions through its Virtual Risk Manager® (VRM) platform. 

Concurrently, eDriving acquired Mentor eData, a consumer-focused telematics app and analytics provider.

The combined companies form the leading driver training and risk reduction business with a mission of training consumer and professional drivers to be the best and safest they can be and evolving crash-free operating cultures for corporations worldwide.

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Lifehacker

You’ve been told over and over that texting while driving is incredibly dangerous (not to mention illegal), but this fun and simple browser game shows you exactly why.

Sometimes the reality of how dangerous something is doesn’t set in until you’ve actually experienced it. This simple game, Gauging Your Distraction, from The New York Times has you moving at high speeds, changing lanes, and trying to answer text messages at the same time.

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By Wendy Eichenbaum

Imagine you’re on a business trip. You return to your hotel room exhausted after a long day of meetings. You look across the room to see a light on by your bed, the sheets turned down, and a chocolate mint on your pillow. It’s just a mint, or is it?

It’s the little details that people remember. People don’t tell their friends that the room was clean or that the bathroom had enough towels. But they will pass on the memory that made the experience special and out of the ordinary. These little details are microinteractions, just one action or moment. One alone can be memorable. Added up, they can define a world-class experience.

The importance of microInteractions cannot be understated. The users may not be able articulate why they chose one product, service, or company over another. But they feel when they love one service or hate another. If you ask people why they love or hate something, they’ll tell you a story, which will describe one superior or frustrating interaction.

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Forbes

CEOs of the big car manufacturers probably have nightmares about waking up to find Google GOOGL -0.39%, Apple AAPL -0.45%, Tesla, or maybe even the Chinese have come up with the electric car for the masses which will spell doom for their business.

Even in their most vulnerable moments though they probably didn’t think this blind-siding torpedo would come from a vacuum cleaner maker.

Dyson the maker of high-priced and high tech domestic appliances and public space hand-dryers, is being funded by the British government to develop an electric car, the Guardian reports, based on what the newspaper believes to be an accidental disclosure by the government.

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