By Art Liggio, President and CEO, Driving Dynamics

Have you ever read the technology disclaimers that come with the vehicles put into your fleet selectors?

Are drivers being advised to review this important, maybe lifesaving information? Or are they getting the keys to their fleet vehicles along with an assumption that the vehicles’ technology will keep them safe?

Imagine this scenario: One of your drivers, in a vehicle equipped with an Automated Emergency Braking (AEB) system, is following an SUV on a multi-lane highway and traveling at a reasonable speed of 35 miles per hour. Suddenly, the SUV in front moves into an adjacent lane and ahead is a stopped vehicle. What was the outcome?

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By Andrew Boada, Editor At Large

Most OEMs are funding research and development of fuel cell vehicles (FCVs), but their collective efforts have been dwarfed by their on-going investment in battery electric vehicles (BEVs).

Is that because hydrogen-fueled vehicles, as Elon Musk once put it, are “an incredibly dumb idea”? If not, then what’s behind the apparent relative lack of interest in FCVs in the auto industry?

FCVs have two clear advantages over BEVs. First, a hydrogen tank can be filled much faster than a BEV’s battery can be recharged. While it can take at least a half hour, and usually more like several hours, to fully recharge a BEV’s battery, it takes around five minutes to fill a tank with hydrogen, roughly the same amount of time to fill a tank with gasoline. Second, fuel cell vehicles typically get internal combustion engine-like range from a single tank of hydrogen, while current BEVs fall significantly short of that mark.

And that’s pretty much where the list of the clear advantages of hydrogen over batteries ends.

There are a whole host of reasons why hydrogen is inferior to batteries as the basis for a power train, but most of them boil down to the fact it’s far more energy- and cost-efficient to get electricity into a battery than hydrogen into an FCV tank, by a factor of three to six times.

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By Dr. Jan Ferri-Reed

Performance review discussions can be tricky. It’s rather uncomfortable to hear your own shortcomings. It’s also uncomfortable to be delivering the “bad news.” But there are some things that a manager should NEVER do during an appraisal discussion, including the following:

Don’t Rely On Generalities

Don’t tell employees that “they always do something wrong” or that they “never do anything right.” Focus instead on specific examples of what your employees did or did not do.

Don’t Threaten Your Subordinates

Telling an employee they must “shape up or ship out” is not going to win you any points. People don’t respond well to threats to stick to giving fair and balanced feedback.

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360.here

There are two critical problems related to solving our cities’ biggest sustainability issues.

The first is how we move people and goods around as efficiently as possible. The second is how to keep a city moving while also reducing CO2 emissions.

HERE and SAP have partnered on a solution that tackles both obstacles. customers or a city’s transportation authority.

Read the article at 360.here.

Forbes

Your Alexa at home and your navigation in your car both tell you how to find things, but in different ways. Until now, Alexa has been available through some cars that are manufactured for compatibility.

Amazon’s Echo Auto connects cars with Alexa and its integrated devices at home via smartphone. Now HERE Technologies has developed a system combining Amazon’s digital assistant and shopping tool with its own navigation as a product for car companies to offer in its models.

Read the article at Forbes.

USA Today

Car companies and the tech companies they work with seem to acknowledge the reality that most of the vehicles we find ourselves in are going to be driven by people.

At the CES in Las Vegas, several vendors demonstrated “digital cockpits” that dramatically improve the displays and controls with which drivers interact.

Read the article at USA Today.

Bloomberg

A cap of 130 kilometers per hour (80 mph) is being recommended by unions and environmentalists, putting an end to Germany’s famous open-road policy.

As a signatory of the Paris Climate accord, Germany must slash emissions from energy, industry, heating and cooling and farming by 2030. CO2 emitted by vehicles has increased since 1990.

Read the article at Bloomberg.

MSN

Cadillac was named the lead electric vehicle brand of General Motors last week.

Newly appointed GM President Mark Reuss said “We don’t have any chances left with taking Cadillac to a really new place. This is pretty much it.”

GM is ceasing operations at five plants in North America amid declining demand for sedans. Over the next two years, GM will double its resources for electric and autonomous vehicle programs.

Read the article at MSN.

By John F. Wysseier, President and CEO, The CEI Group, Inc.

My theme in this continuing blog is that business disruption – the kind that results from a continuous strategic embrace of cutting-edge technology – is not just a good thing, but a requirement. Call it creative destruction. But there’s another kind of technology-powered disruption that is simply destructive: the hacking of an organization’s digital infrastructure.

How pervasive is the threat? Consider the following:

• Computer Ventures, a researcher and publisher covering the global cyber economy, estimates that cyberattacks cost the global economy $3 trillion in 2015, a figure is likely to double to $6 trillion a year by 2021.
• PWC, the accounting and consulting firm, says that 32 percent of U.S. organizations were victims of cybercrime in 2016, and projects that 34 percent will have become victims by the end of 2018.
• Microsoft estimates that average cost of a data breach to a business is $3.8 million, and that the average attacker resides in a network for 146 days before being detected.
• A University of Maryland study found that hackers were attacking computers and networks “at near-constant rate”, with an average of one attack every 39 seconds.

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Ford and the Volkswagen Group are combining forces in a global alliance that will be overseen by a joint committee with an equal number of people representing each automaker. They will be making pickup trucks and commercial vans together.

The medium-sized pickup truck will be built for both companies as early as 2022. The vans are expected to be built in a similar time frame. Volkswagen will build a city van, while Ford will build a larger, 1-ton commercial Transit vans. They are exploring collaborations on autonomous and electric vehicles as well as new mobility services.

Read the article at The Verge.