The key to becoming a more vital cog in the engine that keeps your company moving forward is aligning marketing goals with sales goals.

By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

While my career’s worth of experience proves differently, marketing is still perceived as a discipline focused on positioning. Marketing education, marketing tools, and even today’s digital applications all concentrate on measuring branding, messaging, and communications effectiveness.

Because the goal of marketing is to promote a company brand with a particular market niche or industry, however, it automatically takes a back seat to sales in the eyes of salespeople, the CFO, and even the CEO.

Do you ever have to fend off sales reps’ complaints about Marketing’s ineffectiveness in helping them achieve their sales goals? Do you ever wish you could report to senior management about the number of deals closed in the past month rather than the number of positive impressions among the target audience you achieved?

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Automotive News

The stakes are high for automakers in the future of mass transportation.

At a conference in metro Detroit, Andreas Mai, who recently served as the director of smart connected vehicles at Cisco Systems, estimated the size of the mobility industry — which would include autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing networks and connectivity — to be worth about $5 trillion over the next decade.

The additional value of mobility will be created from the transfer of the market from one stakeholder to another, Mai said. “Some people will lose.”

To mitigate the threat of losing out in an environment that is becoming increasingly crowded with technology giants and young startups, automakers are pivoting to alternative revenue streams and technologies.

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New York Times

Businesspeople generally think of networking as a mutually beneficial meeting for both parties.

But that’s not usually what it is. Far more often, it is one person asking the other for a favor.

I have been a management consultant, business owner and speaker for more than 12 years. Before that, I was a business executive and a trial lawyer. Along the way I have received invaluable advice from others — guidance that educated me and helped me make important professional connections.

Because this advice has been such a great help to me, I believe in helping others in the same way, without expecting anything in return.

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Silicon Angle

Nvidia Corp. has released a new video showing off its latest progress in autonomous vehicle technology, this time with a self-driving car that has learned entirely from watching human drivers.

“In contrast to the usual approach to operating self-driving cars, we did not program any explicit object detection, mapping, path planning or control components into this car,” Nvidia explained in the description for the video.

“Instead, the car learns on its own to create all necessary internal representations necessary to steer, simply by observing human drivers.”

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Washington Post

Helicopter parents could be increasing the risk that their children will wreck the car each time they can’t resist texting their teenager while the kid is driving.

That’s the finding of a survey released this week that explored the disconnect between what people think and what people actually do.

About 96 percent of drivers in the survey see using an app — which could include taking selfies, using the GPS or even changing tunes on a music device — as distracting and potentially dangerous; yet, 68 percent admit doing it.

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Mashable

As self-driving cars slowly make their way onto our roads, how will developers help these autonomous vehicles make difficult decisions during accidents? A new MIT project illustrates just how difficult this will be by mixing gaming with deep moral questions.

The Moral Machine presents you with a series of traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car must make a choice between two perilous options.

Should you avoid hitting a group of five jaywalking pedestrians by hitting a concrete divider that will kill two of your passengers?

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USA TODAY

Just when it seemed like undercover police cars couldn’t get any stealthier, along comes this.

After adding red- and blue-emergency lights inside the front visors of unmarked police cars, Ford said Monday it is introducing rear emergency lights that are built into the spoiler.

The system means that in states where officers in unmarked cruisers are allowed to pull over speeders, it may be harder to recognize their vehicles — until those lights go on.

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Detroit News

California regulators have changed course and opened a pathway for the public to get self-driving cars of the future that lack a steering wheel or pedals.

It’s not going to happen immediately — automakers and tech companies are still testing prototypes.

But, in a shift, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles said in a revision of draft regulations released late Friday that the most advanced self-driving cars would no longer be required to have a licensed driver if federal officials deem them safe enough.

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The Detroit Bureau

After being ignored for years, the cybersecurity of automobiles has become a major concern for carmakers and is now expected to grow quickly into a $759 million industry by 2023, according to a new study by IHS Automotive.

The IHS study noted one result of connected car growth – there are estimated 112 million connected vehicles on the road now – is that cars and trucks are now more susceptible to cyberattacks through the many wireless and wired connections.

Hackers are getting more savvy in perpetrating cyberattacks – more easily and cost effectively – on connected vehicles, IHS concluded, noting that carmakers have increased their efforts to make systems more secure.

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Engineering&Technology

Wireless control techniques will cut accidents on the road and in the air – but can connected vehicles be safe from hackers?

For police trying to stop offenders in stolen cars the weapon of choice has become the ‘stinger’ – a simple chain of spikes designed to blow out the tyres of the oncoming vehicles. But they take time to deploy and lead to risks for the police stretching them across the road.

In the attempt to avoid a stinger spread across half of the road in a high-speed chase, a teenage vehicle thief mowed down Merseyside police constable Dave Phillips in October 2015.

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