By Mark Boada, Executive Editor

Rocky Buoy shies away from taking personal credit. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that San Luis Obispo County, California’s 1,080-unit fleet — the one he’s been managing for the last 11 years — tied for first place in this year’s 100 Best Fleets award program.

“I champion for my customers and my employees, but don’t say I am a champion, please don’t use that word,” he instructed me in a one-hour telephone interview. But what he is comfortable saying is that he believes that his team-oriented leadership style has made a difference.

“No one takes a job and says to himself, ‘I want to fail.’ No, he wants to succeed and wants to do a better job. So, if someone in my department is underperforming, it’s my fault or the supervisor’s fault, we’re not doing something right. Either we’re not letting him know that his mistakes are expensive, or he doesn’t have the right training or we’re not recognizing that something else is wrong. But he wants to do a better job. Never forget that your guys want to do their job.”

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By Jeremy Young, Director of Sales at Motus

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted the day-to-day lives of the mobile workforce, as shelter in place orders have forced mobile workers to stay home.

As a result, companies utilizing fleet programs are finding themselves left with a high volume of fixed-cost assets that are currently sitting idle. Employers are searching for ways to curb overall spending while these company-provided vehicles go unused and continue to accumulate monthly corporate expenses regardless of usage.

While a fleet program may have best suited a business less than three months ago, decision makers are now looking for alternative programs to help them navigate this time of uncertainty in a way that’s best for the organization and its team.

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By Ted Lee, Head of Business Development and Innovation, Magellan GPS

The fleet trucking industry is at the crossroads of a dilemma.

Professional truck drivers from the baby boomer generation are retiring, leaving the fleet industry to face a severe shortage of qualified drivers. As many as 25 percent of today’s drivers will retire over the next three-to-five years.

But it’s not just their behind-the-wheel experience the industry will be losing; it will also be at risk of losing their route-knowledge, key information that often goes unrecorded, such as knowing which roads are hazardous and how to get around unexpected obstacles.

It’s a brain drain the industry can ill afford, especially as it hopes to recruit new drivers to meet rising demand.

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Forbes

The automotive market is about to be seriously disrupted whether you’re in the market for a car or you sell or repair them.

The clean air we have been enjoying during lockdown seems to have aroused consumer interest in electric vehicles, which are no longer available only to the rich. GM is launching a new electric delivery van and plans to introduce at least 20 all-electric models in all categories by 2023. Amazon is working to add 100,000 Rivian all-electric vans to its delivery fleet.

One thing is already clear: with much longer lifetimes and significantly cheaper maintenance costs, electric vehicles are changing the economic parameters of driving.

Read the article at Forbes.

Electrek

General Motors Co. is developing an electric van aimed at business users, joining a growing list of carmakers planning EVs for the same segment which includes customers such as Amazon.com Inc and United Parcel Service Inc.

The Detroit automakers, which count trucks and commercial vehicles among their most profitable businesses, ‘don’t want to leave the door open for Tesla’ as they did in consumer passenger cars.

The GM electric van is code-named BV1, and it is due to start production in late 2021 at GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck factory. It will be built using GM’s new Ultium battery platform, which will support a series of new electric vehicles coming in the next few years.

Read the article at Electrek.

IIHS

According to a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, autonomous vehicles might prevent only around a third of all crashes if automated systems drive too much like people.

To estimate how many crashes might continue to occur if self-driving cars are designed to make the same decisions about risk that humans do, IIHS researchers examined more than 5,000 police-reported crashes from the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey.

Crashes due to only sensing and perceiving errors accounted for 24 percent of the total, and incapacitation accounted for 10 percent. The remaining two-thirds might still occur unless autonomous vehicles are also specifically programmed to avoid other types of predicting, decision-making and performance errors.

Read the article at IIHS.

Detroit Free Press

Getting quality and performance right from the first car out of the factory is never easy, but Ford faces added challenges after the two-month-plus COVID-19 shutdown of assembly plants.

In September, Ford’s scheduled big production launches are: F-150 at the Rouge Complex in Dearborn in September, Mustang Mach-E in Cuauttilan, Mexico, and Bronco Sport in Louisville. The Bronco will be produced in Wayne, Michigan, February 2021.

This year, “we had to adjust schedules to a degree due to COVID-19,” Ford North America Chief Operating Officer Lisa Drake said. The lost time when people would have been physically in the plants installing new manufacturing equipment will delay when production of some vehicles begins slightly, but engineers unexpectedly got a couple of extra months to live with the new vehicles, time to spot issues and refine performance.

Read the article at Detroit Free Press.

strategy+business

The shutdowns resulting from COVID-19 are not just temporary and as the economy is relaunched, it is vital that companies seek to build back better and, in doing so, help society overcome the existential threats of climate change and nature loss.

These include remote teleworking and socializing, near-shoring, and a new mantra of “make where you sell,” which places a new value on localized supply chains and includes a rise in 3D printing and automated manufacturing.

COVID-19 has added a new meaning to the term track and trace, a concept that could be applied to what we produce and consume, which might provide a better road map for conservation and sustainable supply chains. The technology exists; it could be used to increase transparency and efficiency, but we will need to be on the front foot to manage social consequences.

Read the article at strategy+business.

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.

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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.

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