When we interviewed Rob Hill, Multinational Business Development Liaison at ARI , we were keen to learn about solutions ARI offers its global fleets.

“I was visiting with a customer recently where 60 percent of their fleet is in the Americas and Europe, and 40 percent is in Asia. With a fleet as spread out as that, there may be gaps they cannot accommodate. To get that global spend under control is very difficult,” Rob explained.

“At ARI, we are looking at this and asking ourselves if we are approaching this the right way. Does having a global footprint actually mean people on the ground? Or is it being able to offer a solution that will allow an organization to manage their fleet spend through visibility, transparency and control? That challenge is one of the things that ARI is focused on. We want to drive transparency to provide greater insight and control.

“If you design your approach around the management of information, the getting data, refining and clarifying it so it makes sense and provides insight, then people suddenly have significantly more control and can make better, smarter decisions. That way, you can actually look at all 120 markets, markets with multiple suppliers and multiple ways of doing business, and accommodate a customer’s needs.”

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Global fleets will continue to be faced with a dizzying array of fuel choices for some time to come.

By Mark Boada, Senior Editor

Now that four countries — Norway, India, France and the U.K. – have decided to ban the sales of gasoline or diesel fueled vehicles within the next two to three decades, it might seem that electricity has already won the contest to become the vehicular fuel of the future. But even if it comes to predominate, electricity may not be the universal solution for years to come, if ever.

Instead, global fleets may be forced to depend on an ever-changing variety and mix of fuels and powertrains, depending on the countries or regions in which they operate, their mix of light, medium and heavy duty vehicles, and the nature of the trips their drivers make. The reason: each of the alternatives is still struggling to overcome limitations, which include cost, range, refueling time, refueling infrastructure, and fuel availability.

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Part four of a four-part series on negligent entrustment: ‘Onboard vehicle technologies that address areas of liability’.

By Brian Kinniry, Senior Director, Strategic Services, The CEI Group, Inc.

Part one of the negligent entrustment series summarized the main grounds for a fleet-related negligent entrustment case. Part two addressed how a fleet manager could build a transparent, fair, and enforceable safety policy to help safeguard the fleet from exposure to this form of liability. Part three walks through technologies unrelated to the vehicle. Part four investigates onboard vehicle technologies that can prevent accidents and reduce liability.

Training on New Technologies is Paramount to Avoiding Negligence

If your fleet is able to adopt some of the new technologies being outlined today, that is a great step to keeping your drivers safe, but the job is not done after installation.

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The Detroit Bureau

The demand for automotive cybersecurity researchers is outstripping supply as automakers continue to cram more and more computer-based technology into new vehicles.

This offers hackers more and more opportunities to breach systems in vehicles. Stories abound of vehicles being hacked in various scenarios, including one where a tech publication paid hackers to take control of a vehicle while driving.

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IIHS 

Adults have gotten the message that it’s safer for kids to ride in the back seat properly restrained, but when it comes to their own safety, there is a common misperception that buckling up is optional.

Among adults who admit to not always using safety belts in the back seat, 4 out of 5 surveyed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety say short trips or traveling by taxi or ride-hailing service are times they don’t bother to use the belt.

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The Washington Post

Driving under the influence of alcohol is by far the most common drug-related arrest in the United States. Police make more than 1.4 million drunken-driving arrests annually, and they catch only a fraction of offenders.

The criminal justice system often responds to drunk drivers by focusing on their driving, for example, by taking away driver’s licenses, restricting driving to daylight hours, or installing a breathalyzer that locks the ignition if the would-be driver has been drinking. But new research indicates that a highly effective approach to alcohol-involved crime is more direct and simple: Take away the offender’s access to alcohol.

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Jalopnik

Driverless cars promise to save lives by driving better than constantly-texting, easily-distracted, sometimes-even-intoxicated humans, but – like any married couple knows – the cars can’t reach their true potential if they don’t communicate with each other.

Human senses are still better than the radars, lidars and cameras in driverless cars when it comes to things like classifying objects, edge detection, lane tracking and visibility range, according to a new report out of the University of Michigan’s Sustainable Worldwide Transportation research team.

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Futurism

As automakers like Tesla, Toyota, and Volvo focus on developing vehicles that can interact autonomously with their environments, Ari Teman is exploring ways the cars of the future could interact with you.

The inventor, designer, and technologist told Futurism he sees biometrics, which is “the ability for a vehicle, an environment, or a service to recognize who you are and how you are,” as one of the biggest developments in transportation in recent years.

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By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

Throughout this “marketing scam” series of columns, I focused on generally-accepted marketing tactics that waste the limited dollars of the marketing budget and that deliver few sales opportunities.

This final segment is devoted to two final activities that offer questionable value: Fish in a Barrel, where “exclusive” executive events are offered for a limited number of sales representatives to attend, and Question That Award Sponsorship (or Entry), where dubious award companies bestow “awards” for a steep price.

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AutoBlog

Researchers at University of Washington, University of Michigan, Stony Brook University, and UC Berkeley have figured out how to hack self-driving cars by putting stickers on street signs.

Starting by analyzing the algorithm the vision system uses to classify images, they used a number of different attacks to manipulate signs in order to trick machine learning models into misreading them.

For instance, they printed up stickers to trick the vision system an autonomous car would use into reading a stop sign as a 45-mile-per-hour sign, the consequences of which would obviously be very bad in the real world.

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