By Adam Danielson, Director of Sales

October 2020

If a company only pulls driver records (MVRs) at hire and then once per year, and a driver receives a violation or license suspension the day after, he or she has a 364- day grace period before the infraction is discovered.

If this driver were to have a traffic stop or be involved in an accident, the company could face large fines, direct and indirect accident costs and be held liable for negligent entrustment.

Continuous license monitoring allows the fleet manager to receive notifications of violations and license suspensions as they occur — eliminating the pitfall of the yearly “grace period”. When a new violation or license suspension occurs for a driver, an MVR is automatically delivered to the driver manager. By getting this information sooner, the manager can take immediate corrective action with the driver, closing the accident and liability risk exposure gap.

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ARI

2020 has served up plenty of life lesson reminders.

One of these concepts is especially relevant: change waits for no one. Change doesn’t care if you don’t want it, and ready or not, change happens.

All of our lives we’ve been encouraged to embrace change. But whether we’re talking about our personal lives or fleet responsibilities, change can feel uncomfortable and difficult to wrap our arms around. But there’s an upside: while change feels risky, there’s the potential rewards that are worth exploring.

Changing to survive your environment

Obviously cacti are known for their ability to hold water. But did you know their water-storing abilities are completely adaptive? Just like a cactus that evolves in order to survive, your fleet strategy must be flexible in order to continue moving down the road to success. Change may feel prickly, but the alternative is literally getting stuck behind your competitors as you maintain the status quo.

Try looking at change from a different angle

There’s so much more to a cactus than painful spines – all cacti produce beautiful flowers, for instance. There’s another important life lesson for 2020: perspective matters! Instead of looking at only the thorny parts of change that your fleet is facing, try focusing on the value that change presents for improving how you deliver goods and services to your customers.

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Annual survey finds driver scorecards, fatigue management programs have the greatest impact

By Mark Boada, Executive Editor

October 2020

This year’s Network of Employers for Traffic Safety (NETS) Strength IN Numbers® Fleet Safety Benchmark Conference this month demonstrated once again why every fleet should belong to the organization. Why? Because it’s where fleets can learn what works best from the elite in fleet safety.

Like most other conferences held in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the three-day conference was conducted virtually over a very smooth-running platform that made it easy to watch, interact and network with members and suppliers of fleet safety systems.

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The DRIVE

We live in an age of technological progress the likes of which no other period of human invention has ever seen; we have reusable orbital rockets; medical breakthroughs in surgical neurology; and deep-scan imaging uncovering lost civilizations.

But the promise of self-driving cars has yet to be realized, though that’s not for the lack of promise or trying.

Self-driving, also known as autonomous, cars have been in the zeitgeist since the late 1950s. Automakers saw the space age’s marketing and technological advancements capture the world’s imagination, and started hyping “Cars that Drive Themselves!” Unfortunately, no one, and we mean no one, has been able to crack the code, but they’re getting closer.

Read the article at The DRIVE

USA Today

Is there hidden cash parked right in your driveway?

If you’ve got a car lease that’s set to expire in a few months, a red hot used car market means you need to pay extra close attention to the value of your vehicle.

You might want to make a move more quickly than you’d expect – and you might not necessarily want to opt for business as usual and just return the car to the dealer when the lease ends.

“It’s the most unique used-car situation we’ve ever seen,” Ivan Drury, senior manager of insights at Edmunds, said. Some cars, he said, didn’t depreciate in value for almost an entire year.

Read the article at USA Today

AutoBlog

Earlier this week, Tesla sent out its “full self-driving” software to a small group of owners who will test it on public roads. But buried on its website is a disclaimer that the $8,000 system doesn’t make the vehicles autonomous and drivers still have to supervise it.

The conflicting messages have experts in the field accusing Tesla of deceptive, irresponsible marketing that could make the roads more dangerous as the system is rolled out to as many as 1 million electric vehicle drivers by the end of the year.

“This is actively misleading people about the capabilities of the system, based on the information I’ve seen about it,” said Steven Shladover, a research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied autonomous driving for 40 years. “It is a very limited functionality that still requires constant driver supervision.”

Read the article at AutoBlog

Detroit Free Press

No one was crossing Kercheval Avenue on The Hill in Grosse Pointe Farms as a minivan made its way through the shopping district one evening this fall, but people were clearly nearby.

They could be seen there on the laptop screen from inside the vehicle, their presence confirmed by glowing images captured by a thermal camera.

But the pedestrians weren’t on the street, and it took a moment to realize that they were actually on the sidewalk, obscured by decorative plantings and the darkness that coated everything not illuminated.

Read the article at Detroit Free Press

Forbes

Electric vehicles have been the coming thing for quite some time now.

Twelve years ago Tesla debuted its first EV, the Roadster. Ever since, EV enthusiasts have been predicting that the U.S. market for electron-powered personal transportation would soon bloom.

Yet the EV market is now abruptly shedding its elite, early-adopter appeal. If the high stakes and recent, almost universal rush by manufacturers to bring fleets of wholly practical EVs to market is a meaningful indicator, we’re fast approaching the EV tipping point.

What lies beyond is a future where electric cars are the default and gasoline powered cars are relics of a carbon intensive past.

Read the article at Forbes

We will always remember those leaders that helped us navigate tough times

By Mike Pitcher, Author and Fleet Industry Leader

October 2020

As the CEO of LeasePlan USA, we were one of the hundreds of companies that launched visionary campaigns called “Vision 2020”. It is now obvious that we were all clueless on exactly what 2020 would bring. And yet, here we are.

Let me begin by stating my definition of leadership. In my opinion, it is very simple. Leadership is influence. If you are in a position to influence the thoughts, behaviors and / or attitudes of someone else, then you are in a leadership role. I do not believe that leadership is the private domain of corporate executives and politicians. I know for a fact that leadership is practiced everyday in schools, churches, non-profit organizations, and in our homes. The leadership role we hold in our family might be the most important of all.

In this challenging environment of political unrest, social injustice, economic uncertainty, and that other little issue (a global pandemic named COVID-19), how will you influence those that you lead?

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Motus

As we head into the fall season, the pandemic continues to disrupt business activity in the U.S.

The severity of the disruption varies by region and industry, and many leaders are monitoring multiple leading indicators of business activity.

National business mileage activity has shifted from a plateau to a slow but steady increase over recent months. Current mileage activity remains higher than the stay-at-home phase, but incremental growth is at a much slower pace, and has not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. As people WorkForward, field activity is 85% higher than the week of April 5th, the lowest level of business mileage in 2020.

Read the comprehensive report