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

If you’re a fleet manager, chances are you’re aware that the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is moving forward with a new standard requiring companies and organizations to include lease obligations on their balance sheets.

“We believe that this new standard is important because it will provide investors, lenders and other users of financial statements a more accurate picture of the long-term financial obligations of the companies to which they provide capital,” said FASB Chairman Russell G. Golden in a press release.

There are two popular types of fleet leases, open-end and closed-end leases. Historically, businesses and organizations have used operating leases to keep assets off of their balance sheets, effectively treating lease payments as a rental expense. This is commonly referred to as the risk and reward method, as the lessor takes on the risks and rewards of asset ownership.

While the rule doesn’t go into effect until 2018, companies need to start thinking about how they will implement the new rules now.

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San Francisco Chronicle

Two Bay Area companies — FICO and eDriving — next month will introduce a smartphone app that gathers information about your driving behavior and turns it into a score similar to FICO’s famous credit scores.

The FICO Safe Driving Score could be used by employers to monitor workers who drive on the job, by parents to assess their teen drivers and by couples to prove once and for all which spouse is the better driver.

EDriving’s core business is providing driver’s education to beginning drivers, employees who drive a company car and people going to traffic school after getting a ticket. “We are the largest provider of fleet driver safety programs,” said Celia Stokes, eDriving’s CEO.

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Fortune

Hackers can steal your car—and a lot more—through your phone.

An often-asserted downside of internet-connected vehicles is that they’re subject to various forms of hacking, including theft.

On Wednesday, a Norwegian security company called Promon claimed to have found something like the Holy Grail of vehicle hacking—by compromising a Tesla owner’s Android phone, they could take control of Tesla’s mobile app and steal the car.

The hack relies on tricking a Tesla owner into downloading a malicious app, for instance through a spoofed public Wi-Fi hotspot that would direct them to a deceptive Google Play download.

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Wired

Boston is famous for horrendous traffic, labyrinthine roads laid out by ale-swilling colonials, brutal winters, and, according to an actual study, America’s worst drivers. All of which makes it the perfect place for autonomous vehicles.

You’ll see them zipping around south Boston within weeks as local startup nuTonomy begins testing its tech in a fleet of electric Renaults. The announcement comes two months after Uber launched the country’s first autonomous taxi service in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Pittsburgh Post- Gazette

More test cars on the road, fewer human-enabled controls like steering wheels and brake pedals, and more protections for sensitive industry information are all on the wish list this year for developers working to make vehicles fully autonomous.

In comments filed on Tuesday, the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets — founded in April and led by Uber, Google, Lyft, Ford and Volvo — urged federal authorities to loosen guidelines issued in September on the testing and deployment of fully autonomous vehicles.

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Total Landscape Care

Hmmmm … it’s half the cost of a new truck and it comes with a 3-year/75,000-mile warranty?

Yes.

A vehicle remanufacturer in Tyler, Texas, rebuilds fleet vehicles, including trucks and vans, in a short amount of time and can save fleet owners plenty of money.

“The guy or gal who owns a new fleet is going to save half the cost of a new vehicle and run it for twice as long. Someone please tell me what’s wrong with this model,” Vehicle Reman Marketing Director Steve Belden told Hard Working Trucks.

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GCN

As the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration works to safely integrate autonomous vehicles onto the nation’s roadways, lawmakers and industry advocates are wrestling with the federal government’s role in regulating a rapidly evolving – and potentially life-saving —  technology.

At a Nov. 16 hearing of the Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies, Chairman Sen. Susan M. Collins (R-Maine) called for balance between innovation and oversight to “help ensure that automakers are able to bring the safety and mobility benefits of autonomous vehicles into the marketplace without unnecessary government regulations.”

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The Detroit News

Groups that lobby for carmakers and technology companies are accusing President Barack Obama’s administration of overreaching in its final days with its proposal to ask phone companies to lock most of their popular applications during driving.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is proposing a new rule that would ask manufacturers of phones and other electronic devices to voluntarily lock most applications that could distract drivers when cars are in motion.

Under the proposal, features like internet browsing and texting would be blocked on phones that are paired to the on-board computer systems of cars.

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McKinsey & Company

As four technology trends reshape the global automotive sector, customer preferences are moving away from its traditional strongholds, such as chassis and engine development.

This shift in customer preferences and the sheer size of the automotive sector have attracted new players: a potent mix of large high-tech companies and start-ups. Both differ from the automotive incumbents on virtually every level.

These new entrants and the disruptive trends they bring—electrification, autonomous driving, diverse mobility, and connectivity—will transform typically vertically integrated automotive value chains into a complex, horizontally structured ecosystem.

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The New York Times

Are people better off when they buy things from companies that don’t have public shareholders they need to please?

The answer, at least in the nearly $200 billion auto insurance industry, appears to be yes.

That’s the conclusion of a new and comprehensive study examining the claims-paying histories of more than 300 auto insurers in the last five years.

The analysis was conducted by ValChoice, a data analytics company that aims to bring some transparency to the opaque insurance market.

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