By Ed Pierce, President of ITA Communications. Fleet.

Business leaders are hearing much more about “disruption” than ever.

Certainly, marketers must not only adapt to the concept to remain viable. But they must also promote the concept to their employers and customers.

Here are 10 trends marketers should be talking about, excerpted from the book, “Disruptive Marketing: What Growth Hackers, Data Punks and Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us About Navigating the New Normal” by Geoffrey Colon.

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By Ed Dubens, Founder/ CEO of eDriving

Over the last few years advances in smartphone telematics technology not only means we can help drivers remain safe while driving for work purposes, but it also means we now have the ability and the data to respond in seconds in an emergency when it can mean the difference between life and death!

We all know about a single vehicle “event” with a driver unconscious at the side of the road and no witnesses to call for help, OR a driver delivering parcels in the run up to Christmas hijacked enroute to their delivery locations.

According to a European Transport Safety Council report: “Road safety policies typically aim to prevent collisions from occurring and to mitigate the impact of the collisions that do occur. An issue that has received less attention, is how improvements in emergency response can also help prevent deaths and reduce the severity of injuries.”

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NHTSA

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration today released the Early Estimate of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities for the First Quarter of 2021.

NHTSA estimates that 8,730 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in the first three months of 2021, a 10.5% increase from the 7,900 fatalities the agency projected for the first quarter of 2020.

These increases in fatalities come even as driving declined; preliminary data reported by the Federal Highway Administration show that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the first three months of 2021 decreased by 2.1%, or about 14.9 billion miles. The fatality rates per 100 million VMT for the first quarter of 2021 increased to 1.26 fatalities per 100 million VMT, up from the projected rate of 1.12 fatalities in the same time last year.

To assist stakeholders in evaluating the trends and identifying countermeasures, NHTSA today also released the 10th edition of Countermeasures That Work. This report supports a proactive, equitable safe system approach to eliminating fatalities on our nation’s roads, and addresses the safety of all road users, including those who walk, bike and drive.

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Reuters

Getting more Americans to switch to a battery-powered car by improving access to charging infrastructure is a key component of President Biden’s agenda. 

The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill provides for $7.5 billion in charging network investments over a five-year period, with a portion set aside for low-income and rural areas.

California’s incentives for disadvantaged communities are gradually increasing. Applications for the state’s EV rebate program from low- and middle-income households have increased to a quarter so far this year, and around a third of funding for a popular state EV charging program is earmarked for disadvantaged communities.

Read the article at Reuters.

The Car Gossip

Any self-respecting off-road vehicle comes with impressive water-fording capability, something Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe showed off in a recent video posted to Twitter. It shows a Rivian R1T wading through water nearly up to the top of its hood.

Rivian’s website lists a wading depth of more than three feet.

Aside from a handful of those Amazon vans, Rivian hasn’t delivered any vehicles to customers yet. R1T and R1S deliveries were originally scheduled to start toward the end of 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic pushed that back to summer 2021

Read the article at The Car Gossip.

The Drive

The average car is maintained based on a time schedule or the mileage, measuring the useful life of lubricants and wear items on the engine. Vehicles can rack up hours and hours of idle time while doing very little mileage at all. If ignored, the result can be catastrophic engine damage.

For example, a 2016 Ford F550 with the 6.7L Power Stroke engine with just 27,000 miles did duty as a tow rig for an auction company. Spending much of its time idling or doing low-speed jobs on the lot, it may have been maintained according to a typical time or mileage schedule.

The oil pan had large amounts of sludge and the oil pickup looked almost entirely blocked. The oil itself was a rich grey-black color, showing it had gone far beyond a reasonable change interval and picked up plenty of little bits of engine along the way. The turbo was also destroyed from a lack of sufficient lubrication.

Read the article at The Drive.

J.D. Power

J.D. Power released the results of its 2021 U.S. Initial Quality Study (IQS) today, finding that new-vehicle quality has improved two percent overall from 2020.

“Owners are caught in the middle when vehicle and phone technologies don’t properly connect,” said Dave Sargent, vice president of automotive quality at J.D. Power. He continued to say that “with more vehicles being fitted with the wireless technology owners want, the study reveals an increase in connectivity problems between smartphones and vehicles, leaving many owners unhappy.”

For the first time since the study’s inception, Ram is the highest-ranked brand in overall initial quality.

Read the article at J.D. Power.

IIHS

Crash avoidance features and teen-specific vehicle technologies have the potential to prevent or mitigate up to three-quarters of fatal crashes involving teen drivers, a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows.

Front crash prevention, lane departure prevention and blind spot monitoring could be relevant to about a third of teen driver deaths and a quarter of teen driver injuries. Vehicle features and smartphone apps designed specifically to make teens drive more safely could apply to nearly a third of teen driver injuries and as many as two-thirds of teen driver deaths.

About a fifth of injuries of 16- and 17-year-old drivers and a third of their deaths occurred between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. That suggests that apps that notify parents of curfew violations could deliver safety benefits if parents are serious about enforcing nighttime driving restrictions.

Read the article at IIHS.

In recent months, Fleet Management Weekly interviewed a number of top executives of leading fleet management companies.

All the interviews included the perspectives of these leaders on the most significant fleet industry trends and developments that their clients must focus on to benefit from the dramatic changes sweeping fleet.

From overcoming the current supply chain disruption to the transition to electric vehicles, the growth of artificial intelligence and last-mile delivery services, our FMC leaders demonstrate how they are strengthening their value to their fleet clients.

As one FMC executive put it, the “new normal” will be anything but normal.

We summarize their key observations.

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By Adam Danielson, Sales and Business Development Director

The volume of fleet safety data is continually expanding. The data alone, even when normalized and aggregated, cannot identify the difference between good and risky drivers.

The adage “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” explains the need for tools to use actionable data in driver safety.

The volume of data is continually expanding. The data alone, even when normalized and aggregated, cannot identify the difference between good and risky drivers. To assess risk, the data needs to be compared to appropriate benchmarks.

Benchmarks can be set both at the fleet and driver level to compare data against the organizational goals and industry standards.

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