Photo credit: La Cantera Resort & Spa

By Rich Mallek, Director of Business Development, FLD Remarketing

Like many of the attendees at last week’s annual Automotive Fleet Leasing Association (AFLA) conference, I was decidedly unsure how the event would turn out.

After more than 18 months of virtual meetings and halting interactions, I wondered whether my colleagues in fleet were ready for what usually turns out to be several days of face to face meetings, close contact with long-time friends, and commiserating with people we may not have met before.

Especially considering that the annual NAFA show held the previous month in Pittsburgh had a markedly smaller crowd than years past, and many notable participants in NAFA’s usually bustling conference floor missing in action.

As I boarded my flight to San Antonio, many unanswered questions swirled in my head.

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By Steve Saltzgiver, Director of Strategic Innovation, RTA Fleet Management Software

As fleet professionals, we focus on the right metrics to track to monitor how our fleet is performing, and what reports to run to ensure we’re up to date on services and staying on budget.

But how can you determine if you have a successful fleet?

Other industries have books, manuals and more to determine what it means to succeed. There are conferences and keynotes all the time on Customer Success. Even IT departments now have benchmarks to strive to achieve to be deemed successful.

But there has never been a clear definition for Fleet Success.

Until now.

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Fleet Management Weekly Staff

As supply chain disruptions are expected to continue into 2022, fleets continue to implement strategies for retaining assets to accommodate for a lack of new vehicle inventory.

Merchants Fleet, in its Guide on How to Adapt to Vehicle Shortages, has some excellent tips for any fleet manager facing the vehicle shortage dilemma, starting with maintaining an order calendar with milestones – such as incentive negotiations, upfitter discussions, total cost of ownership analysis, and vehicle selections — and then back track these required steps to take.

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Roadshow

Consumer Reports examined the rise of destination fees and found they’ve climbed from an average of $839 in 2011 to $1,244 in 2020, a massive 48% increase in less than a decade. Over the same period, the price of an average new car has risen “just” 27%.

Even if integrated into MSRP, another issue would linger: The distance to a buyer’s destination. Cars are big, heavy things that need to travel thousands of miles to buyers – except when they don’t.

How many people in suburban Detroit live a few miles from the Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, but paid the same $1,195 destination fee on a new Ford Ranger that they’d have to pay in San Francisco? The same might be asked of new Hyundai Sonata buyers in Alabama who paid $1,005 to ship a car that was made in Montgomery, Alabama.

Read the article at Roadshow.

MSN

Rental-car agencies sold off their excess vehicles during the early days of the pandemic and were caught off guard when demand returned sooner than expected

Experts are offering different predictions for when the rental scene in the U.S. will get back to something more normal. Some say it will be at least 2022 before prices come down.

Rental companies are changing their policies to keep their cars longer before they cycle them out of the system. Vehicles are being moved away from locations that used to cater to business travel—which is returning, but still not as high as before the pandemic—and into southern vacation hot spots.

Read the article at MSN.

Autoblog

Rivian shared new details of the Amazon deal. The e-commerce giant will have exclusive rights to Rivian’s delivery vehicles for four years after receiving its first one, and it gets right of first refusal to buy the vans for two years after that.

PitchBook analysts forecast the total Amazon order could bring more than $4.5 billion to Rivian and, more importantly, additional commercial customers.

The unknown price of each van is just one part of the equation. The agreement also includes provisions for recurring revenue for fleet management, such as software updates and running diagnostics.  Amazon currently is testing a handful of pre-production vans in cities across the U.S.

Read the article at Autoblog.

The Detroit Bureau

Chevrolet officials confirmed the brand will debut its all-electric Silverado at CES 2022 during GM CEO Mary Barra’s keynote address on Jan. 5.

The electric Silverado will offer customers a GM-estimated range of more than 400 miles on a full charge.

Designed as an EV from the ground up, the Silverado EV harnesses the best of the Ultium Platform and Silverado’s proven capability. The fleet and retail versions of the electric Silverado will offer customers a variety of options and are expected to be in high demand.

Read the article at The Detroit Bureau.

RideApart

If we’re going to adopt electric vehicles in any meaningful way, we need the kind of infrastructure that can support ever-larger chunks of the population making that switch.

The Regional Electric Vehicle Midwest Coalition (or REV Midwest) – governors of five Midwestern states – Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin—all signed a Memorandum of Understanding to co-develop “a regional framework to accelerate vehicle electrification in the Midwest.”

Goals of this agreement include advancing an equitable, data-driven transition to EVs for all communities to reduce emissions keep development within communities sustainable and the acceleration of medium- and heavy-duty fleet electrification through coordination of charging infrastructure, particularly along commercial corridor, as well as standardization of regulatory schemes.

Read the article at RideApart.

By Teri Ross, Vice President of Sales & Client Relations at PARS

The impact of COVID-19 has cascaded throughout our world to affect just about every aspect of our lives.

Likewise, in the transportation industry, even after 18 months challenges remain. COVID disruptions touch many of the services provided to our clients and we must face the fact that some of these disruptions are going to resolve slowly.

In the following sections, I detail the lingering pandemic’s impact on each aspect of the delivery cycle and how to adapt. One thing is clear, we are now living in a world where patience is a true virtue.

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By Ed Dubens, Founder/CEO of eDriving

Are the Managers of your Drivers playing their part in creating a crash-free culture across your organization?

Official figures revealed a surge in deaths on U.S. roadways in the first quarter of 2021 – a 10.5 percent increase from the same period last year. And we already know that around 94% of collisions can be attributed to driver attitudes and behaviors, which tells us that the key to reducing collisions is to improve those attitudes and behaviors. But does that mean that your driver risk management program should focus purely on driver attitudes and behaviors, or those of managers, too?

eDriving’s primary research has proven what other cognitive studies have shown: namely, that training – whether virtual or in person – can only change the risk level of a driver so much. Personal performance coaching has been found to be one of the best methods of reinforcing safer, sustained low-risk behaviors.

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