By Greg Neuman, CEI Senior Manager of Quality Control

With consumer watchdogs constantly warning about buying used cars that have flood damage, fleet managers may be justifiably skeptical about whether it’s worth repairing one of their own.

At CEI, we’ve successfully managed hundreds of repairs of flood-damaged vehicles, but knowing when it’s possible to return one to completely safe usability is one of the most difficult tasks in the body repair business.

Vehicles are made to withstand a certain amount of exposure to water. It’s deep and prolonged submersion, especially in certain kinds of water, that determines whether repairs are worth the money or you’re better off declaring the vehicle a total loss.

What makes today’s vehicles especially vulnerable to floodwaters are the extent to which they’ve become electronic.

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Runzheimer

Companies have long pursued strategies to minimize employee travel costs.

That means taking advantage of cost-effective airlines, negotiating better deals with preferred hotels, and booking everything far in advance to lock up lower rates. But even as business administrators work to economize corporate travel, costs continue to rise.

To adapt to the shifting business travel landscape, companies must strategically advance their approach to travel. Runzheimer’s latest white paper, Adapting to a Shifting Business Travel Landscape, discusses specific steps businesses should take to evolve their business travel programs.

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Work With the Customer to Develop an Action Plan

By Mike Cieri, MSIR, Vice President of Mardac Consultants

The following four-step process can be extremely effective in handling a difficult customer:

1. Be aware of your personal perceptions, biases, and reactions.
2. Calm the customer with basic counseling skills.
3. Diagnose and analyze the situation.
4. Work with the customer to develop an action plan for solving the identified problem.

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The Detroit News

Get ready for the engine in your next car to shut off at stoplights, even if you don’t like it.

Pressed to meet tougher fuel-economy and pollutions standards, automakers increasingly are adding engine stop-start systems across their lineups. The systems automatically turn off engines at stoplights and instantly restart them once a driver takes his or her foot off the brake pedal.

The technology is designed to keep your lights, air conditioning, heater and radio running while the engine is cut during a stop. The engine stays on if you turn the steering wheel, if you’re stopped on a steep hill, the engine is still warming up, or the heater or air conditioner are working hard to maintain a desired temperature.

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Vancouver Sun

Pulling his Tesla Model S onto Highway 1 from McGill Avenue, Bruce Sharpe clicks a lever on the steering column to engage its adaptive cruise control, which takes control of managing the car’s distance from the truck ahead and watches for vehicles around it.

Click it again, and the car’s sensors and systems start to steer around a slight curve in the road following the centre of the lane. Sharpe’s hands are off the wheel, though hovering nearby in case he needs to take control.

“It does a great job with just tracking (the lane and surrounding traffic), so that you don’t have to do all of that steering yourself,” Sharpe said.

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The Car Connection

Last week, Ford showed off its new, predictive pedestrian detection system, which is slated to debut on the 2017 Ford Fusion. But that’s not the only safety technology that Ford’s been working on. The automaker has unveiled a host of high-tech features that will soon appear on Ford vehicles worldwide.

Here are some of the ones we’re most excited about:

Evasive Steering Alert: This similar to the collision avoidance feature found on some other automobiles. Like them, Ford’s Evasive Steering system scans the road ahead for problems, sounds an alert if an obstacle appears, and can even apply the brakes.

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Fortune

Coming to a city near you in 2030.

Over the coming decades, a dozen dense and developed cities may aggressively use shared fleets of electric and self-driving cars that could be summoned to pick up passengers and shuttle them to offices and stores.

Such cars, which could carry anywhere from two passengers to 20 passengers, could cost less to use and be more convenient than owning a car, according to a new report from the research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance on Tuesday.

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Science Daily

It’s a common dilemma for any business or government agency that manages a large fleet of vehicles — what is the optimal window for replacement? Iowa State University researchers have found an answer to that question that could potentially save millions.

Sree Nilakanta and Kevin Scheibe, both associate professors of information systems in ISU’s College of Business, partnered with the Iowa Department of Transportation to tackle the problem. They analyzed 10 years of maintenance records for DOT snow plow trucks — more than a million pieces of data — to determine when the DOT should replace old ones.

Nilakanta and Scheibe then created a simulation-based decision support system using the maintenance records, purchase price and resale estimates in yearly increments.

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By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

In this era of digital marketing, micro-marketing is this decade’s most noteworthy consumer marketing trend.

Yet, customer-centric sales and marketing is a long-time B2B strategy that predates micro-marketing and can deliver the same benefits.

However, the value of a customer-centric approach eludes many B2B organizations, including many in the fleet industry. The problem stems from the typical marketing and sales (or sales and marketing) structure.

The definition of “customer-centric” for marketing has been traditionally focused on identifying and communicating with “target markets” through appropriate media. Messaging is usually based on an understanding of common needs.

The definition of “customer-centric” for sales begins with business relationship mapping that lays out a prospect’s stakeholders, organization, culture, industry, and strategic plan.

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Fortune

The carrier is trying to turn cars into Wi-Fi hotspots for less than rival carriers.

T-Mobile is going after a piece of the connected car market with the introduction on Monday of a small wireless plug-in module for cars called the SyncUp Drive.

The ZTE-made device plugs into a common data port in cars, known as the OBD-II port, and allows users to monitor aspects of car performance and maintenance needs while also acting as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

The move comes as growth in the wireless phone business is slowing dramatically, and carriers are looking to new areas for adding revenue. One promising market carriers are all pursuing is the Internet of things, which includes connected computing devices ranging from car sensors to smart thermostats and security drones. Some 20 billion to 30 billion smart devices could be online by 2020, according to an estimate by McKinsey & Co.

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