Many Own­ers Com­pul­sively Top Up Their Batteries

Pity the poor Tesla owner. After pay­ing $70,000 or more to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak, it turns out that she or he is now afflicted with “range anx­i­ety,” a new dis­ease ram­pant among the high-income electric-car owner demographic.

Range anx­i­ety is caus­ing overuse of free elec­tric car charg­ing sta­tions by ner­vous dri­vers, who are afraid of not mak­ing it back home or to another charg­ing sta­tion before they run out of juice. Some of these overusers are admit­ted free­load­ers. “If it’s free, I’ll take it,” Michael DeLune, a Tesla owner and admit­ted free­loader, told the Orange County Reg­is­ter. “I’ve done that on occasions.”

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Thanks to tech­nol­ogy, no mat­ter where you are in the world you’re able to learn from the fleet man­age­ment experts in NAFA’s ongo­ing webi­nar series.

“Webi­nars are one of our most use­ful ways of offer­ing fleet man­age­ment edu­ca­tion,” said NAFA’s Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Phillip E. Russo, CAE.  “Hun­dreds of fleet pro­fes­sion­als took advan­tage of our webi­nar series last year and we expect the num­bers to grow in 2014. The qual­ity of the edu­ca­tion is fan­tas­tic, the top­ics are wide-ranging, and they’re avail­able when­ever you want them!”

Read more about the new webi­nars avail­able in 2014.

The newest ver­sion of FLD Inc’s smart­phone app, OnceOVR, includes spe­cial­ized inven­tory man­age­ment and fleet audit func­tion­al­ity aimed at alle­vi­at­ing the issues faced by fleet man­agers and strate­gic sourc­ing and pro­cure­ment pro­fes­sion­als nationwide.

“OnceOVR™ sim­pli­fies the inven­tory man­age­ment and fleet audit process while help­ing fleet man­agers reduce their expo­sure to risk and refine their fleet strat­egy,” said Gary Mott, vice pres­i­dent of FLD.

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Accord­ing to Black Book data, used vehi­cles model years 2008–2012 over­all depre­ci­ated –1.9% in Jan­u­ary, slightly weaker reten­tion com­pared to the –1.4% rate in December.

“Jan­u­ary saw a few key trends that illus­trated some tur­bu­lence in the used-car mar­ket, as truck seg­ments had a bumpy month and domes­tic vehi­cles also saw large monthly declines,” said Ricky Beggs, Edi­to­r­ial Direc­tor of Black Book. “This down­ward pric­ing pres­sure should ease in the near-term as buy­ers ele­vate their activ­ity for the Spring tax-buying season.”

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Whether com­pa­nies require action­able infor­ma­tion from their vehi­cles, assets, cus­tomers, work­ers and/or part­ners, Tel­o­gis Fleet 11 enables con­nec­tiv­ity between what is hap­pen­ing in the field and the back office. Fleet 11 fea­tures mobile appli­ca­tion enhance­ments and new maps that are opti­mized for mobile devices, allow­ing super­vi­sors and oper­a­tions leads to eas­ily visu­al­ize vehi­cles, assets and workers.

“The tri­fecta of con­nected loca­tion intel­li­gence, under­stand­ing what’s hap­pen­ing with dri­vers behind the wheel and the abil­ity to derive action­able ana­lyt­ics from that data is really what dri­ves busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion for our cus­tomers,” said Mark Wallin, vice pres­i­dent, prod­uct man­age­ment at Tel­o­gis.

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Tak­ing a proac­tive approach to fleet man­age­ment means not only mon­i­tor­ing your dri­vers from the office or your mobile device, but also mak­ing sure your dri­vers are aware of their own behav­ior in real-time, allow­ing them to make a change immediately.

This can be achieved with a fleet track­ing solu­tion, like GPS Insight, by cre­at­ing cus­tomized fleet alerts — and cus­tomiz­ing a GPS track­ing alert to notify your dri­vers is simple.

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Donlen Launches Dri­ver­Point Con­sul­ta­tive Services

Donlen released its case study of a six-month trial of Donlen’s Telem­atic Solu­tion, Dri­ver­Point “Return on Invest­ment: Eric­s­son Sees Results with Dri­ver­Point® Telem­at­ics.” Through­out the trial, there were wide­spread improve­ments in dri­ver behav­ior, fuel econ­omy, and safe dri­ving patterns.

These improve­ments were due in large part to a new pro­gram devel­oped between Donlen and Eric­s­son, Dri­ver­Point Con­sul­ta­tive Ser­vices. For exam­ple, fleet oper­a­tors can track accel­er­a­tion, decel­er­a­tion, idle time, and cre­ate geofences and land­marks. These are fairly com­mon fea­tures of Telem­at­ics sys­tems. But through Dri­ver­Point Con­sul­ta­tive Ser­vices, Eric­s­son also received insight into oper­a­tion of their vehi­cles and could iden­tify oppor­tu­ni­ties to lower cost and improve safety.

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Sav­ings at the pump off­set by increased vehi­cle costs, and pos­si­ble supply-chain delays.

ARI’s 2014 Indus­try Out­look, the annual pub­li­ca­tion pro­duced by the company’s Strate­gic Con­sult­ing Team, gives fleet man­agers insight into the trends and oppor­tu­ni­ties expected to affect their fleet oper­a­tions through­out the year. This year’s Out­look focuses on how total cost of own­er­ship (TCO) will be influ­enced by the approach­ing dead­lines for the revised fed­eral Cor­po­rate Aver­age Fuel Econ­omy (CAFE) stan­dards, which aim to increase fuel effi­ciency and reduce CO2 emis­sions. Read more

Based on the com­ments from atten­dees at NAFA’s 2013 Inter­na­tional Fleet Acad­emy, the 2014 Inter­na­tional Fleet Acad­emy is one event fleet man­agers with global respon­si­bil­i­ties can­not afford to miss. The three-day con­fer­ence will be held July 13–15 at the Rosen Shin­gle Creek Resort in Orlando, FL.

NAFA’s Inter­na­tional Fleet Acad­emy was cre­ated to demys­tify global fleet man­age­ment with experts and panel dis­cus­sions that pro­vide valu­able cost-saving strate­gies, offer strate­gic overviews of the dif­fer­ences among coun­tries and cul­tures, inform atten­dees of the right ques­tions to ask for the RFI-RFQ process, and present valu­able lessons on how to decrease cor­po­rate lia­bil­ity by avoid­ing inter­na­tional insur­ance pitfalls.

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