By Randy Shadley, CAFM, ProFleet Solu­tions, LLC

Ques­tion: What do Yogurt, Yoga, and Your lia­bil­ity have in common?

Answer: They are all related to a Cal­i­for­nia Court of Appeal rul­ing (Moradi v Marsh USA), where the insur­ance com­pany, Marsh USA, Inc., was found to be liable for dam­ages when one of its employ­ees — who reg­u­larly used her per­sonal vehi­cle for com­pany busi­ness — was involved in a crash after work on per­sonal time, while headed for frozen yogurt on the way to a yoga class in her per­sonal car.

You read that right: per­sonal car, per­sonal time, per­sonal errands after work, employer respon­si­ble for dam­ages. Not for dam­ages to the employee’s car, mind you, but dam­ages to the third party.

READ MORE

Bob San­dler, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent, Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence and Enter­prise Con­sult­ing, Ele­ment Fleet Management

Inter­est rates have been low over the past few years. In fact, they have stayed low for so long that experts mon­i­tor­ing the state of the econ­omy are pre­dict­ing an impend­ing increase in inter­est rates over the next few years. This has caused finance depart­ments to won­der if they should con­vert their assets to fixed inter­est rates in order to mit­i­gate the risk of poten­tial increases.

READ MORE to learn four things to con­sider when mak­ing a deci­sion regard­ing fleet financ­ing and the move to fixed inter­est rates.

If your dri­vers take home com­pany vehi­cles, do you mon­i­tor their per­sonal use dur­ing non-working hours? If not, it could be cost­ing your busi­ness seri­ous money. Uti­liz­ing a GPS track­ing solu­tion, like GPS Insight, to track how dri­vers are using com­pany vehi­cles when they are not on the clock will pre­vent increased oper­a­tional costs, fuel con­sump­tion, and other expenses for your fleet.

READ MORE

Anheuser-Busch’s goal is to reduce emis­sions and fuel costs, while doing some­thing green(ish) and has announced that it is going to replace all 66 of the heavy duty trucks at its Hous­ton brew­ery, with 66 new trucks, that instead run on com­pressed nat­ural gas.

The trucks in its exist­ing fleet are not old or falling apart — they are tough, reli­able diesel-powered work­horses that pull 53-foot trail­ers loaded with 50,000 pounds of beer. Each truck rolls vir­tu­ally around the clock — putting in an aver­age of 140,000 miles in a sin­gle year haul­ing beer to whole­salers. They move sev­en­teen mil­lion bar­rels of beer each year.

READ MORE about this decision

The self-driving car seems like a ter­ri­ble driver’s dream: no steer­ing wheel to con­trol, no trou­ble par­al­lel park­ing, no con­cerns about hav­ing a cou­ple of beers on the way home from work. But the removal of fal­li­ble human dri­vers might cre­ate havoc for auto insurers.

Human error accounts for 90 per­cent of road acci­dents, accord­ing to the Inter­na­tional Orga­ni­za­tion for Road Acci­dent Pre­ven­tion, and our col­lec­tive fail­ure rate helps the auto insur­ance indus­try rake in a cool $157 bil­lion in pre­mi­ums each year. So if self-driving cars elim­i­nate all those dri­ver mis­takes, the busi­ness of insur­ing vehi­cles will nec­es­sar­ily change as well.

READ MORE about likely changes

Com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy has shaken the book busi­ness to its foun­da­tions, not to men­tion news­pa­pers, and auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ers might be the next indus­try ripe for attack.

When the global auto­mo­tive indus­try gath­ers in Paris next month for the bien­nial car show, you will hear the usual sooth­ing claims about how healthy the indus­try now is, and how it’s poised for long-term healthy growth. The trou­ble is there are some sin­is­ter issues fes­ter­ing away behind the scenes which might ambush a com­pla­cent industry.

READ MORE

Recently-launched Azuga Fleet Mobile is the first-of-its-kind gam­i­fi­ca­tion and dri­ver rewards pro­gram. This new inter­ac­tive appli­ca­tion, avail­able on iOS and Android, gives dri­vers the abil­ity to track dri­ver scores and com­pete to earn rewards from top brands such as Ama­zon, Wal­mart and Burger King. The solu­tion is designed to cre­ate a trans­par­ent and real-time appli­ca­tion for the dri­ver and their fleet man­ager — wherein the dri­ver will be able to track per­for­mance through­out the day and the fleet man­ager will then have capa­bil­ity to give rewards for improved dri­ving behav­iors, which ulti­mately will increase safety, decrease costs and increase dri­ver retention.

READ MORE

NAFA’s Inter­na­tional Fleet Acad­emy (IFA) is tak­ing place Novem­ber 5–7 at Rosen Shin­gle Creek in Orlando, FL. It is designed specif­i­cally to meet the needs of those who man­age fleets out­side of the United States and Canada, and offers fleet pro­fes­sion­als the tools to gain under­stand­ing, and the oppor­tu­nity to dis­cuss the prob­lems and chal­lenges they’re fac­ing with some of the bright­est minds in global fleet management.

READ MORE to learn about just a few of the dynamic edu­ca­tional ses­sions offered at NAFA’s Inter­na­tional Fleet Acad­emy: Global Pol­icy Struc­ture and Gov­er­nance; Global Fund­ing Dif­fer­ences Using Finance Leases, Oper­at­ing Leases, and Cap­i­tal Allo­ca­tion Strate­gies; and Imple­ment­ing a Global Sus­tain­able Drive Chain.

As more and more automak­ers are slowly reveal­ing their autonomous dri­ving tech­nolo­gies and vehicle-to-vehicle com­mu­ni­ca­tion capa­bil­i­ties, the ques­tion of pri­vacy and just how much per­sonal data motorists will have to give up is becom­ing a concern.

Though the cars and high­ways of the future will likely make our day-to-day com­mutes more con­ve­nient, the big ques­tion is at what cost?

READ MORE

“Review­ing the cur­rent sup­plier mar­ket for fleet man­age­ment ser­vice providers in Europe, there is not the one-size-fits-all solu­tion,” says Tobias Kern, senior con­sul­tant at Brussels-based global fleet con­sul­tancy, FleetVi­sion, who has recently rolled out its right­sourc­ing fleet man­age­ment pro­gram on behalf of an inter­na­tional fleet client.

This client had an off­shore solu­tion in place, where an inter­nal fleet man­age­ment team was cen­trally man­ag­ing all oper­a­tional fleet processes. The back­ground to the ten­der process was to assess alter­na­tive fleet man­age­ment con­cepts with the key focus on estab­lish­ing the most ben­e­fi­cial solu­tion in terms of ser­vice qual­ity for the dri­vers, inter­nal costs, and strate­gic sup­port for cen­tral fleet responsibilities.

READ MORE