By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

Despite the booming economy, smart companies continue to manage expenses, particularly selling, general and administrative (SGA) expenses.

According to financial consulting firm Sageworks, average overhead for scientific and technical services companies – including companies in the fleet services industry – represent over 50 percent of sales.

These are expenses that cannot be assigned to the cost of providing a specific service. A large portion of these expenses fall into the marketing bucket, such as direct sales, product development, distribution, advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and customer service.

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It’s your job to reach your potential. Let’s all create an environment of winners.

By Walter Bond

Our daily lives are filled with opportunities to have stinking thinking. Stinking thinking is when you meditate on what’s going wrong in your life and in your business. There is absolutely no room for stinking thinking in business in a booming economy. Yes I said a booming economy. You see there is always need around us. It’s our job as business people to cultivate the need. How good are you in cultivating need in your business and with your clients each day?

Winners meditate on how it will work and the good that is around them. They see situations as opportunities to develop and pursue the next big thing. There is always good in every situation. It’s our job to develop and think about how to use every situation to our advantage. What are you meditating on? How it can work or how it can’t work? That’s the defining difference in developing a Winner’s Mindset.

Winners develop the play. They strategize and execute on the strategy. They look for daily opportunities. They surround themselves with positive people and listen to positive things. You can’t believe the best when there is negativity all around you. Winners are positive people. Winners are focused people. Winners are also committed people.

READ MORE to learn the 3 ways you can commit to developing a winning mindset each day

CleanTechnica

A recent study published in the journal Applied Energy, revealed that the total cost of ownership (TCO) is lower for EVs than comparable traditional vehicles, due to incentives, savings on fuel, less wear on the brakes and fewer moving parts.

Of the three types of electrified vehicle, the pure EV wins out.

The TCO for hybrids was higher than that of traditional vehicles in all regions studied, because they still use fuel, and receive less in the way of incentives. Plug-in hybrids were the most expensive type of vehicle.

Read the article at CleanTechnica.

CNN Tech

Waymo is suing Uber for allegedly stealing trade secrets and self-driving car technology when Waymo’s former engineer, Anthony Levandowski left the company, supposedly stealing thousands of confidential documents containing trade secrets.

Waymo believes Uber executives, including then-CEO Travis Kalanick, knew about the stolen data. It claims the company used Waymo’s laser and radar technology called LiDAR to further its own self-driving efforts.

“We have accumulated significant and compelling evidence of Uber’s theft and use of Waymo’s trade secrets, and we look forward to finally presenting our case to the public,” a spokeswoman for Waymo told CNNTech.

Read the article at CNN Tech.

BBC

The price of real estate, the decreased income that service stations receive from mechanical repairs and fueling at big box stores, have contributed to the steady decline of fueling stations in the last two decades.

In the future, autonomous vehicles will make all the decisions about where and when to stop for refueling, so no one knows for sure what a gas station will look like when the computer is running the cars.

“In other words, the new model took the money out of petrol. Big box stores weren’t selling fuel cheap because they wanted to profit on it — they were selling it cheap because they were going to make a profit on all the other stuff consumers purchased after they bought their petrol.”

Read the article at BBC.

Detroit Free Press

Self-driving cars do not mean the end of driving, or the end of automotive design, but just the opposite – your focus doesn’t have to be on the speedometer, the fuel gauge and the windshield.

Driving is drudgery a lot of the time, but people don’t want to relinquish the possibility of taking the wheel, Autotrader senior analyst Michelle Krebs says. “People want driverless performance when they’re commuting and maybe on long road trips, but they want the option to drive themselves.”

Read the article at Detroit Free Press.

Wired

Utilities will need to transmit more power as more people replace their internal combustion engine powered cars with electric cars.

Nationwide, utilities are adopting smart grid technologies—sensors and other feedback mechanisms that allow for real time models of demand.

“If every customer starts buying electric vehicles, obviously that would cause a big impact on utilities,” says Mohammed Beshir, a professor of electrical engineering at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering.

Read the article at Wired.

The New York Times

Most in-dash navigation systems lack traffic data or point-of-interest information, and have clunky update procedures.

Many carmakers bundle their navigation systems with other features, forcing buyers to take one in order to get something else they actually want. Next-generation navigation systems are a crucial step in the development of autonomous vehicles.

In a recent test of a 2015 model-year car, the built-in navigation system had no listing for a winery that has been in business for 15 years – both Apple Maps and Google Maps found it in a split second because smartphone navigation apps are cloud based, continually updated with new information.

Read the article at The New York Times.

strategy+business

According to a December Gallup poll, 28 percent of adults rate business executives’ honesty and ethical standards as low or very low, 54 percent rate them as average, and just 16 percent rate them as high or very high.

As a business leader if you’re not good at leading cynical people, chances are you’re not good at leading a lot of the people you’re supposed to be leading.

Cynics make great employees as long as three rules are followed: 1. Be honest, 2. Play fair, 3. Do what you say you are going to do!

Read the article at strategy+business.