June 2, 2020

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Editor’s Analysis & Top Industry News

The Season of Our Discontent

Fleet managers have truly been operating on the front lines; first, grappling with appalling effects of the pandemic and now with fallout from the nationwide protests. FMW applauds the hard work you are doing in the midst of two crises.

How are fleet management companies assisting their clients during these stressful times? For an answer to that question, we turned to Matt Dyer, CEO of LeasePlan USA, to talk about his clients’ reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic and discover solutions the company is putting forth to deal with the unprecedented challenges our industry is facing.

In Crash-Free Culture, Paul Atchley, PhD, eDriving’s Brain Scientist Advisor, asks if we are set for an increase in distracted driving. In the midst of everything else, would we be surprised?

Drive safety and keep well!

Janice Sutton
Editor in Chief


VIDEO: eDriving’s COVID-19 Resource Center Offers Tips to Mitigate Risks

Fleet managers and fleet drivers today are dealing with more than they had ever imagined, and eDriving’s COVID-19 Resource Center offers a bunch of great tips to mitigate current risks.

VIDEO: New Leadership at AFLA


 Elizabeth Schlict Takes the Helm at AFLA
 

Like many of you in the corporate fleet world, FMW has enjoyed working with Elizabeth Schlict in her past 6 years at AFLA, and we are quite pleased to see her move into the role of Executive Director.


Video Interview with YOU Here?

 Request for Zoom Video Interviews
 

We’re ramping up FMW’s video interviews via Zoom given the times, and are looking to speak with a variety industry experts (and we know that many of you are reading!).

Please feel free to suggest yourself, or someone you know. Any and all timely industry topics will be considered, and we look forward to speaking with you!

Email Ted Roberts to learn more: [email protected].


The Fleet Spot

Michael Ferreira Named Senior VP of Global Sales and Marketing at Donlen

Donlen is proud to announce the appointment of Michael Ferreira to the role of Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing.

Dr. Ferreira brings more than 30 years of international experience to the role, spanning over five continents, including nearly four years at Donlen, where he most recently served as Vice President of Sales for Strategic accounts, leading critical sales positioning, new business development and overall responsibility for marketing and our global partner network.

“I am delighted Michael is joining the Donlen senior leadership team,” said Donlen President Tom Callahan. “He has a deep knowledge of the global leasing and fleet management markets, mobility products, channel partnerships, and the ability to transform his subject matter expertise into profitable sales results. We look forward to seeing continued success from Michael in this new role.”

READ MORE

Save the Date for NETS Virtual Strength in Numbers Fleet Safety Benchmark Conference

The health and wellness of conference attendees is of utmost priority. Therefore, given the current pandemic situation, NETS annual conference this year will be a virtual event during the week of October 12th.

Stay tuned for more information coming soon regarding exact dates, conference registration, speaker line-up, virtual Sponsor exhibits, and more!

NETS annual STRENGTH IN NUMBERS® Benchmark Conference convenes each year to bring together Global, Corporate, Government, and Non-profit employers. Conference participants include NETS member companies from diverse industries, representing a collective global fleet of more than half-a-million vehicles, ~80% passenger vehicles, that travel nearly 11 billion miles annually.
NAFA Announces Opening of Nominations for 2021 Board of Directors

NAFA Fleet Management Association is seeking candidates for its 2021 Board of Directors.

The process began June 1, 2020 and concludes Thursday, October 1, 2020. To be considered, nominees must complete a Candidate Consideration Form, available online at http://www.nafa.org/BoardCandidate

The Association seeks forward-thinking professionals to help shape the future of the fleet industry. They should have a passion for fleet management, strong strategic and critical thinking skills along with a consensus building approach to problem solving.

The NAFA Board helps shape the future of the profession and set the agenda for the industry to achieve high levels of performance.

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Driving Dynamics Restarts National Behind-the-wheel Program with New Virtual Options and Non-Contact Measures

After temporarily suspending its flagship DriveReady Advantage™ open enrollment program to avoid health exposure related to the COVID-19 crisis, the company has introduced additional social distancing components to continue providing fleets with essential driver safety training.

Driving Dynamics Inc., a provider of advanced performance driver safety training, coaching and risk services for organizations that operate vehicle-fleets in North America and around the globe, has announced the open enrollment format of its foundational skills-based driver safety program will resume with a phased roll-out starting in June.

The DriveReady Advantage (DriveReady) course now includes heightened safety protocols, format changes and new virtual options to adhere to social distancing guidelines and accommodate policy mandates and comfort levels of its customer base.

Read the release at Driving Dynamics.

Fleet Marketing


By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

Although the economy has been growing for some time now, businesses continue to focus on savings when comparing products and services. Savings is just too limited a means of determining the potential benefit of a product or service.

A good example: cost savings persist in carrying the most weight in the procurement’s “weighted scorecard”. Worse, there is the oversimplification of costs into two buckets — “hard” or “soft.” This effort may uncover easy-to-find “hard” cost savings while disregarding or undervaluing “soft” costs that have a detrimental effect on the business.

Value, on the other hand, is all-encompassing. It takes into account both cost reduction and revenue generation. Yes, it is inherently harder to analyze but provides a more accurate basis for decision-making by offering an entire spectrum of possible business rewards.

READ MORE

 

Crash-Free Culture


By Paul Atchley, PhD, eDriving’s Brain Scientist Advisor

For Mother’s Day this year, my spouse and I drove 800 miles from Florida to see my mother who lives by herself in rural Virginia.

The twelve-hour journey reminded me of how the current crisis has affected the traffic on our roadways. Traffic was relatively light both directions and I started to wonder how these times would be reflected in crash statistics.

But on the return journey, I was reminded that there is never a good time for complacency. In South Carolina, on a daytime freeway with light traffic and sunny weather, we passed a horrific single tractor-trailer crash. In the median, full of pine trees, sat a tractor-trailer that had left the freeway, and hit a stand of pines. The cab was crushed and open to the elements. The numerous patrol vehicles and officers that surrounded the cab told a story of an investigation in progress. There was no sign of a driver or medical responders.

In that brief glance it was impossible to tell the circumstances of the crash. But I was left wondering why a tractor-trailer would end up off road on a clear freeway, light with traffic in the middle of the day. My thoughts turned to distraction and how we must remain constantly vigilant, even now.

READ MORE

 

Consultative Aid


Fleets driving less, extending leases, delaying orders

By Mark Boada, Executive Editor

In this exclusive interview with Fleet Management Weekly, Matt Dyer, CEO of LeasePlan USA – one of the largest fleet management companies in North America – discusses his clients’ reactions to the pandemic and how the company is helping them find solutions to the challenges they’re facing.

How much less driving are fleets doing because of COVID-19? Does it vary by the type of fleet or the nature of the drivers’ job?

Although it felt like everything stopped immediately, that’s not entirely true for the majority of our clients. In fact, we only saw a 36.5% mileage decrease from our client fleets in the first two months of the pandemic. Many of our customers fall into the essential business category, so they have continued to operate their fleets albeit under new health and safety guidelines from the CDC.

READ MORE


Fleet Trends & Issues

Driver Death Rates Remain High Among Small Cars

IIHS

Despite manufacturers’ efforts to make them safer, the smallest late-model cars remain the most dangerous, according to the most recent driver death rates calculated by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety.

Small cars and minicars accounted for 15 of the 20 models with the highest death rates for model year 2017, while nearly half of the 20 models with the lowest death rates were luxury SUVs.

“Smaller vehicles offer less protection for the driver in crashes, and their lighter mass means that they take the brunt of collisions with larger vehicles,” says Joe Nolan, IIHS senior vice president of vehicle research.

Read the article at IIHS

Lock Your Cars! Vehicle Theft Spikes in COVID-19 Pandemic

U.S. News

With more people than ever staying home to lessen the spread of COVID-19, their sedans, pickup trucks and SUVs are parked unattended on the streets, making them easy targets for opportunistic thieves.

The virus has created a “perfect storm: Drivers are at home and not using or checking their cars regularly. School’s out, so teenagers are trying their luck. Criminals are out of work and have more time on their hands or need fast money to support a drug habit.

Salt Lake City police Detective Greg Wilking said a 22% spike in vehicle burglaries there could be from a few criminals working quickly on “car prowls.” “It’s really 10 seconds,” he said. “They’re not spending a lot of time in your car. It’s a smash-and-grab-and-go,” sometimes in broad daylight.

Read the article at U.S. News.

Fatality Investigation: Fatigued Construction Worker Dies in One-Vehicle Collision

EHS Today

The victim was traveling on a major, four-lane interstate en route to an out-of-state destination to pick up supplies when he failed to notice that traffic had stopped – he only obtained 3.5 hours of sleep prior to beginning work.

Employers should be aware of and avoid work schedules that may contribute to worker fatigue. In this case, the company contacted the victim only six hours prior to the departure time in order to complete the task in the time-frame requested by the employer.

Occupational injuries and fatalities are often the result of one or more contributing factors or key events in a larger sequence of events that ultimately result in the injury or fatality. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) investigators identified four unrecognized hazards as key contributing factors in this incident.

Read the article at EHS Today.

Ford Isn’t Worried About Low Gas Prices Fueling EV Avoidance

Green Car Reports

While an extreme upward spike of gas prices might boost electric-car sales, there’s little or no precedent to show that a sudden drop in gas prices – like earlier this year – will cause sales of EVs to fall.

Ford is now expecting that by 2030 up to a third of all vehicles sold globally could be EVs and doesn’t see the success of its EVs like Mach-E as being tethered to the price of gas.

Ford’s global director of electrification, Mark Kaufman said, “a lot of the different CO2 demands from around the world are going to drive us that way. Ford’s perspective is in order to meet that demand, you’ve got to really come up with a compelling reason for the customers to buy – so exciting products, great capability, new functionality that you can’t quite get with a conventionally powered vehicle for us are all ways that we can help manage that transition to the end of the decade.”

Read the article at Green Car Reports.

EVs Today


Bloomberg

The Electric Vehicle Outlook is BloombergNEF’s annual long-term forecast of how electrification, shared mobility and autonomous driving will impact road transport from now out to 2040.

It covers light duty passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, buses, and two/three-wheeled vehicles. The report draws on our team of specialists around the world and looks at how these trends will impact the automotive, energy, infrastructure, and battery materials markets over the next 20 years.

Automakers are accelerating their EV launch plans, partly to comply with increasingly stringent regulations in Europe and China. COVID-19 will delay some of these, but by 2022 there will be over 500 different EV models available globally. Consumer choice and competitive pricing will be key to attracting new buyers to the market.

Read the article at Bloomberg.

 

More Efficient Fleet Management


By Trent Dressen, Director of Sales, SuperVision

“There’s an app for that” has become a common catchphrase that pretty much sums up today’s reliance on and easy access to technology.

The fleet industry has become a beneficiary of this technological boom with the ability to access all types of data related to vehicles, location drivers and more.

Aside from the convenience of these customized technology solutions, which help make the fleet manager’s job easier, is the added safety that goes along with many of today’s digital products.

Among these is a powerful tool that every fleet has at its disposal to pinpoint the riskiest drivers in the fleet and act before a crash or a fatality occurs: continuous driver monitoring.

READ MORE

 

Fleet Spectator


By Mark Boada, Executive Editor

It’s a tough time for the business-to-business car sharing industry. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic chilled the market, the by-the-hour rental business was suffering.

In February, Share Now, born by the merger of BMW’s and Daimler-Benz’ car sharing divisions and operating as Car2Go, closed its doors in the U.S. and Canada, after exiting all cities in Europe except Brussels, Florence and London last December. Then, in April, GM, announced that it was shutting down Maven, its car sharing division, citing as its reasons the pandemic’s effect on demand and that the business was “not profitable.”

Alex Thibault is vice president of Vulog and general manager of its North American operations. Vulog is the leading maker of car sharing platform technology and counts some of the biggest names in the ride-hailing and rental car companies in the world. In this interview with FMW, Thibault comments on the state of the business-to-business, or B2B, car sharing business and the broader car sharing industry as well.

READ MORE





Fleet Management Resources

 

AFLA
The Automotive Fleet & Leasing Association. Advancing corporate fleet worldwide.

eDriving
eDriving partners with its clients to engage with drivers and their managers to create a culture that supports lasting behavioral change to reduce collisions, injuries, license violations as well as a fleet’s total cost of ownership.

SuperVision
SuperVision is a fleet driver management solution for MVR & license monitoring, fleet management, fleet safety oversight and driver performance and retention.

The CEI Group Inc.
CEI is North America’s largest provider of fully integrated fleet accident management, driver safety and risk management services.

NAFA Fleet Management Association
NAFA is the association for the diverse vehicle fleet management profession regardless of organizational type, geographic location, or fleet composition.

WEX
WEX fuel cards and fleet management solutions give you powerful tools to reduce spending — for any business, any fleet, any size.

Driving Dynamics
Driving Dynamics was established to help corporate fleet drivers develop expert, safe driving skills using proven, advanced driving techniques.

PARS
PARS’ mission is to provide you with high-quality service at competitive prices for all of your transportation needs.

Wheels, Inc.
First in fleet for 80 years. Wheels helps you build tomorrow’s fleet today.




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