Long-time fleet indus­try mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sional, Ed Pierce, has opened the doors to a new mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions firm, It’s The Arts. The com­pany pro­vides business-to-business brand­ing, con­tent mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices. Because of his long-time asso­ci­a­tion with the fleet indus­try, which began in 1978 in sup­port of Rollins Auto Leas­ing, Pierce intends to focus on inte­grated pro­grams that effec­tively engage and influ­ence tar­geted audi­ences of fleet oper­a­tions and affil­i­ated fleet companies.

“While today’s fleet man­agers may be using e-newsletters, email broad­cast­ing, and even Share­point for com­mu­ni­ca­tions, new con­tent mar­ket­ing and hyper-targeted mes­sag­ing tech­nolo­gies will allow them to com­mu­ni­cate fleet goals and strate­gies tai­lored to indi­vid­u­als’ needs rather than to just the seg­ments’ needs,” notes Pierce.

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Com­pany cites desire to max­i­mize share­holder value

PHH Corporation’s fleet busi­ness con­tin­ued to rack up “solid results” last year, and the com­pany announced that — despite an uptick in fleet seg­ment sales and prof­its in 2012 — it has retained J.P. Mor­gan Secu­ri­ties LLC, Cen­ter­view Part­ners LLC, and Kirk­land & Ellis LLP to assist in explor­ing ways to max­i­mize share­holder value through the sep­a­ra­tion or sale of the Company’s fleet busi­ness, its mort­gage busi­ness, or both.

PHH’s VP of Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Dico Akser­aylian, reas­sured the company’s cus­tomers that “the recent announce­ment has absolutely no impact on the focus and com­mit­ment of our Fleet busi­ness. Our cus­tomers and their dri­vers remain our top pri­or­ity. Our focus is squarely on con­tin­u­ing to deliver lead­ing fleet man­age­ment solu­tions for cus­tomers that drive their busi­nesses for­ward, includ­ing rais­ing the bar on cus­tomer ser­vice and devel­op­ing new tools and technology.”

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Con­gested roads, busy sched­ules, and idiots on the road are a fact of life. Road rage can esca­late, to fatal extremes, very quickly.

Urban plan­ners and neu­ro­sci­en­tists have stud­ied the exter­nal and inter­nal fac­tors that con­tribute to aggres­sive, reck­less, and venge­ful driving.

The car has been described as “like a sec­ond home,” almost an exten­sion of the driver’s per­son. There­fore “motorists tend to respond to per­ceived threats in a ter­ri­to­r­ial fashion.”

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The EcoDiesel-powered 2014 Ram 1500 has earned a 28-mpg rat­ing from the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA), the best highway-cycle test result ever achieved by a full-size, half-ton pickup. It also exceeds the EPA high­way rat­ing for the top-ranked small pickup.

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Con­nected cars were all the rage at the Chicago Auto Show and awards were given to vehi­cles that offered the “right mix of safety, con­ve­nience and info­tain­ment technology.”

“The more dri­vers are involved in non­driv­ing tasks, the more we will see crashes go up,” said David Teater, a senior direc­tor with the Itasca-based National Safety Council.

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The 2015 Chevro­let City Express — a cargo van built for Gen­eral Motors Co. in Ten­nessee by Nis­san Motor Co. — is the lat­est exam­ple of global automak­ers work­ing together.

Based on Nissan’s NV200 cargo van, GM unveiled the City Express at the Chicago Auto Show. The part­ner­ship saved GM hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in devel­op­ment costs in design­ing a van from the ground up. It shows how car­mak­ers are work­ing together, mostly on advanced tech­nol­ogy projects but also on vehi­cles and engines.

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CAFE′ chase at root of prob­lem? Smaller engines, along with trans­mis­sion prob­lems lead to first decline in 15 years.

For the first time in 15 years, the over­all depend­abil­ity of vehi­cles has slipped as mea­sured by J.D. Power & Asso­ciates’ annual U.S. Vehi­cle Depend­abil­ity Study, which was con­ducted late last year among 41,000 cus­tomers who have vehi­cles from the 2011 model year. Over­all vehi­cle depend­abil­ity, as mea­sured by Power, fell 6% from last year’s study.

Depend­abil­ity is a major deter­mi­nant for fleets as well as con­sumers con­sid­er­ing their next vehi­cle selec­tion. More than 50 % of own­ers who report trou­ble free own­er­ship remain loyal to that brand, and nearly 20% will avoid brands that rank in the bot­tom 25% of the J.D. Power study.

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Study Shows High Sat­is­fac­tion and Con­tin­u­ing Strong Intent to Pur­chase GPS Fleet Man­age­ment Sys­tems among Fleets in a Wide Range of Categories

C.J. Driscoll & Asso­ciates, a lead­ing sup­plier of mar­ket research and con­sult­ing ser­vices for the GPS and wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion indus­tries, has released a new multi-client mar­ket­ing research study cov­er­ing inter­est, use, and sat­is­fac­tion of U.S. fleet oper­a­tors with Mobile Resource Man­age­ment sys­tems and services.

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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.