By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

By leveraging the power of your critical constituencies – customers, employees, strategic partners, a company can exponentially expand the number of voices delivering a message.

As most marketers know, it’s exciting to launch a new social media effort. Building followers, likes and connections from ground zero is rewarding. However, what happens when the novelty wears off and your vast network of contacts tires of posts, blogs and tweets?

Having a community of advocates who are just as excited about your company and vision as you are provides a full spectrum of transmission frequencies instead of just one, helping spread the word about what you’re doing to many more people than you could reach on your own.

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The Hill

The federal government is taking a number of steps to promote auto-safety technology in the U.S., but there is one area that may be getting overlooked: its own fleet of vehicles.

Regulators are working to expand the prevalence of collision-avoidance systems and other semi-autonomous features in cars, which have been praised for their ability to save lives, reduce traffic and improve fuel use.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) is expected to release guidance for states on self-driving vehicles later this summer.

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By Janice Sutton

In this wide-ranging interview, we asked Stuart Donnelly, International Sales Director at Fleet Logistics International, to bring us up to date on the company and tell us what he is seeing in today’s global fleet arena.

Independent of banks, leasing companies or manufacturers, and operating in 47 countries and managing nearly 200,000 vehicles, Fleet Logistics is Europe’s largest fleet management company.

The company has experienced significant growth in the past five years, partly because of some strategic acquisitions.

And they are on the move; last year, Fleet Logistics opened an Asia-Pacific hub in Singapore, and has most recently begun operations in Sao Paolo.

When we interviewed Stuart in Birmingham, England, the UK Brexit vote was a just few weeks away. Since this historic vote we followed up with him to get his thoughts on the impact of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. Hint: he is very optimistic!

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USA Today

A chainsaw-wielding landscaper held off a driver with a knife during a road-rage incident reported to police here.

The victim told police that she had to slam on her brakes to avoid hitting a vehicle in front of her, and the driver got out and started yelling at her. “The suspect was inside his car and got a knife out,” according to the police report. “He then got out of the car and started yelling at her while waving the knife.”

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The Detroit Bureau

So often, car buyers are shopping for a payment. However, they often forget that the monthly outlay for a vehicle is so much more than paying on the note: insurance, gas, maintenance all add up in a hurry, and where you live can double some of those numbers, according to a new study.

The most expensive place and the cheapest place to own a car are pretty surprising: Wyoming and Hawaii. Wyoming topped insurance.com’s list of priciest places to own a vehicle.

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The Detroit News

Electric-vehicle charging cords could soon go the way of the cassette tape, floppy disk and landline telephone.

Suppliers like Qualcomm Inc. and a handful of after-market companies offer wireless charging that requires no cords or physical contact. Some automakers are beginning to implement it on their fleets, although it will likely first be available mostly on high-end luxury makes.

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Ford.com

Ford Motor Company and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are collaborating on a new research project that measures how pedestrians move in urban areas to improve certain public transportation services, such as ride-hailing and point-to-point shuttles services.

The project will introduce a fleet of on-demand electric vehicle shuttles that operate on both city roads and campus walkways on the university’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus.

The vehicles use LiDAR sensors and cameras to measure pedestrian flow, which ultimately helps predict demand for the shuttles. This, in turn, helps researchers and drivers route shuttles toward areas with the highest demand to better accommodate riders.

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CNN.com

When you are driving, how often do you see other drivers checking their phones while behind the wheel? And, be honest, how often do you do it yourself?

The problem has gotten so big that highways across the country now regularly warn drivers “Don’t text and drive.” And 46 states and the District of Columbia have laws banning texting and driving

But the issue isn’t just talking and texting anymore. Drivers are on Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Maps, Spotify, YouTube and now “Pokemon Go,” the video game that has captured the world’s attention and has become the latest concern for distracted-driving advocates.

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There’s no doubt that the future looks bright for autonomous vehicles; projections for its commercial deployment vary wildly, from a few years, to not in our lifetime.

While most of the focus is on the technology that enables autonomy, too little attention has been paid to other aspects of driving and our highway system, such as insurance and regulation, and even the willingness of drivers to surrender agency — the ability to control outcome — even if the autonomous system can do better in most instances.

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IIHS

Red light camera programs in 79 large U.S. cities saved nearly 1,300 lives through 2014, researchers from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have found.

Shutting down such programs costs lives, with the rate of fatal red-light-running crashes shooting up 30 percent in cities that have turned off cameras.

“We know we have a problem: people dying at signalized intersections because of people running red lights,” IIHS President Adrian Lund said as he presented the new research at a red-light-camera forum hosted by the Institute. “We know red light cameras are part of the solution.”

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