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The Detroit News The Trump administration has submitted its final version to the White House Office of Management and Budget to roll back stringent gas-mileage rules enacted by the Obama administration. Details have not been made public yet, but it is expected to call for reducing the required annual fleetwide average mpg increases for carmakers for model years 2021-2026 from the original 5% to a less stringent 1.5% California, which helped craft the Obama-era rules, sued over the rollback and has promised to also sue over the revocation of its right to set its own more-stringent mpg requirements. The nation’s largest state accounts for 12% of the U.S. auto market. Thirteen states and Washington, D.C., have adopted California’s gas mileage rules. Read the article at The Detroit News. |
The New York Times Average annual automobile insurance rates in the United States rose 2% in 2019 to $1,548, and while that was roughly on a par with the annual inflation rate, it followed several years of larger increases. One way to keep premiums down, say industry experts and consumer advocacy groups, is to compare quotes from different insurers, ideally every year or two. Another way to lower your premium is to increase your policy’s deductible, the amount of money that you must pay before insurance coverage begins. (With a $500 deductible, you would pay $500 for a $1,000 claim.) Raising your deductible to $1,000 from $500 will save an average of 13 percent on your premium. Read the article at The New York Times. |
The Detroit Bureau Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is taking steps to make choosing and buying an electric or hybrid vehicle easier by making Mopar’s 240-volt wall-charger available on Amazon.com. Additional FCA consumer websites will offer the same solution as the company launches more than 30 electrified nameplates by 2022. The 2020 calendar year will bring seven new EVs to the FCA global line-up. “Our industry is approaching an inflection point in demand for affordable long-range electric vehicles,” said Micky Bly, head of Global Propulsion System Engineering, FCA. “This action is just one of FCA’s efforts to improve awareness and convenience in the EV purchase experience. We see opportunities to make owning an EV easier and creating a simple solution for at-home charging is among them.” Read the article at The Detroit Bureau. |
TechRadar At CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Bosch unveiled a new AI-powered sun visor that prevents you being dazzled, without obscuring your view of the road. Driving a car and being temporarily blinded by the glare of the sun can be a scary and dangerous experience that happens all too often in certain weather conditions. If you’ve spent any time behind the wheel, or even as a passenger, then you’ll know just how dazzling the sun can be on a bright clear day. It’s a bit of a nightmare. The Virtual Visor is actually a combination of ideas and technology. The transparent LCD panel is the main element, but there’s also a camera that intuitively monitors the driver and passenger too. Bosch revealed to TechRadar at CES that this tech duo then uses computing power to solve the glare issue by calling upon intelligent algorithms to adjust the visor and its glare-busting powers dynamically as it identifies shadows on the face of the driver. Read the article at TechRadar. |
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 strategy+busines To better understand how leaders view the effects of technology on their workforces and society, strategy+business looked back on two years’ worth of interviews conducted with CEOs from around the world. Change the Conversation: “We need to help people understand that working for the same company in the long term, right up to the age of 65, no longer makes sense….We must change our approach and be very flexible, because all this transformation will erase many traditional views that we have about labor relations.” Antonio Huertas Mejías,CEO, MAPFRE Focus on your existing workforce: “I saw an interview with the Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, where he was asked, ‘Where do you get these techies from?’ And he said, ‘I hired the people you fired.’ Piyush Gupta, CEO, DBS Bank Read the article at strategy+business. |
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 International Fleet World The Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom are now the best prepared countries in Europe for the electric vehicle revolution. That’s the finding of LeasePlan’s latest EV Readiness Index, which analysed 22 European countries on their “preparedness for the electric vehicle revolution” and found almost all had improved in the last year, but some significantly more than others. The research, which covers EV registrations, the maturity of EV infrastructure, government incentives and LeasePlan’s experience with EVs in each country, found that improvements in EV readiness were due to a combination of the increased availability of public charging infrastructure (up 73%) and a more beneficial taxation regime for EV drivers in many countries. On average, EV drivers pay 40% less tax than drivers of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles, although in some countries EV drivers actually pay more tax. Read the article at International Fleet World. |
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 The number of documented incidents of the hacking of connected cars and trucks worldwide doubled last year, continuing an accelerating trend that has seen their number rise by more than 600 percent since 2016. That’s the major finding revealed by Upstream Security, a cybersecurity firm based in Israel, in its latest annual report on trends in the “smart mobility” ecosystem. Among the report’s most troubling findings: - Unlike prior years, when most of the documented cases were conducted by researchers to determine connected vehicles’ vulnerabilities, last year the majority of the hacks – 57 percent – were conducted by criminals.
- The vast majority – 82 percent — of the attacks were conducted remotely, both short- and long-range, which don’t require physical access to a vehicle and can be conducted from anywhere in the world.
- A third of the attacks were made via the vehicles’ keyless entry system.
Read the article from Help Net Security |
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