By Fleet Management Weekly Staff

Like most government fleets, including cities all over the country, the city of Austin is pivoting towards electric vehicles.

The city’s Fleet Mobility Services manages a comprehensive full life cycle management program for approximately 7,000 vehicles and pieces of equipment across the entire city, including emergency services as well as city owned utilities: water, electric, refuse, and public works.

The Emerging Technology Division of the fleet department is working on a strategy of advanced automotive technology on multiple fronts, including alternative fuel programs, electric vehicles, telematics, and car sharing.

Thanks to a clear mandate from the city of Austin’s leadership on developing a BEV program, Fleet Mobility Services has plenty of momentum to make the transition to EVs

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Mark your calendar! Plan to join NETS on October 5 & 6, 2022 at the beautiful Marriott at Eagle Crest, Ann Arbor, Michigan

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 that travel nearly 11 billion miles annually.

NETS’ 2022 Conference will be a hybrid event so you can join in person or join us virtually via Whova.

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Sally Compton, CAFM, has worked for Cornell Fleet Services for more than five years. She and her team oversee five motor pool sites where they share 250 vehicles and track another 650.

She uses FleetCommander from Agile Fleet, which has allowed her to entirely automate her fleet. “Our drivers like that Agile’s Commander system is easy to use and the fact that they can make a reservation anytime and from anywhere, and that they can pick up keys 24/7,” Sally says.

“Our first success was being able to look at utilization and clearly see what vehicles were being under used. Armed with this information, we can easily make decisions about the fleet,” she states.

In fact, Cornell Fleet Services was able to reduce their inventory by 35% by correctly identifying under-utilized vehicles and moving customers into other vehicles that still satisfied their needs.

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April 23, 2022 – Car leases are stuffing more clauses into the contract that may make it much harder for you to trade in your lease or sell it to another dealer. At least five automakers are banning lessees from selling the car to any dealer outside their brand.

Consider buying out your lease if you don’t want to lease or buy another new car right away. This is an especially advantageous strategy if you entered your lease before the 2020 pandemic began because your lease’s residual is fixed in the contract.

Dealers love a repeat customer. If a dealer knows you have a desirable car they can sell and you’d like to keep leasing, you’re likelier to get into a brand-new car sooner than later, and likely for the same price or better.

via Car and Driver

April 24, 2022 – Rivian CEO R.J. Scaringe has the worst news yet saying, “Semiconductors are a small appetizer to what we are about to feel on battery cells over the next two decades.”

Scaringe believes the compacted timeline for switching millions of personal vehicle sales from ICE to battery-electric is going to expose the lack of preparedness along the entire battery supply chain, from mining to producing the final packs.

Right now, “90% to 95% of the supply chain does not exist” to furnish the targets governments and OEMs have set for a decade from now.

via Autoblog

April 22, 2022 – BrightDrop’s Stephen Marlin achieved the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS® title for greatest distance traveled by an electric van on a single charge, in a BrightDrop Zevo 600, with a journey from New York City to Washington, D.C.

It could likely even travel farther on such localized routes, given the energy it could recoup through braking that it likely wasn’t getting on its highway drive from New York to D.C.

BrightDrop has a deal with FedEx, aiming to provide 2,500 of the EV vans to the delivery giant, hence the FedEx livery on the record-setting van. BrightDrops claims a total of 25,000 reservations, and the Zevo 600 is currently being produced.

via MotorTrend

April 23, 2022 – Next Spring, the nation’s first mile of public road that can charge electric vehicles as they drive over it will go online in Detroit.

The road isn’t meant to bring an EV back from empty: It charges at 20 kilowatts, roughly the same consumption rate an EV uses at highway speeds. The technology is the same used to wirelessly charge a smartphone—on a much larger scale. Proponents say that if every state adopted the tech it could unlock seamless coast-to-coast travel in an EV and cars that would run indefinitely without needing to stop for recharging.

via The Daily Beast

Fuel taxes account for 84 percent of federal and 29 percent of state highway funds. But where will the funding come from when more and more drivers switch to electric vehicles?

“The road tax is built into the price of gas. That money goes to support road infrastructure. And EVs don’t fuel up, so electric car drivers don’t contribute in that way,” says Gabe Shenhar, associate director of Consumer Reports’ auto test program.

Currently, the federal tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents per gallon. The average state gas tax is 31 cents; it ranges from 8 cents per gallon in Alaska to 51.1 cents per gallon in California. Some states have compensated for that lost revenue by doubling the registration fees for EVs, for instance. Another approach is to increase tolls on roads and bridges, with every driver paying the same toll, no matter what type of car they drive.

via Consumer Reports

By Hari Nayar, Director of Electrification & Sustainability, Merchants Fleet

The electric vehicle revolution is here, and it will only grow in popularity.

Many businesses have started their fleet electrification process or are in the planning stages. Every fleet can benefit from electrification, regardless of size, industry, or location. Electric vehicle manufacturing has grown evolution exponentially in the past few years and now includes cars, cargo vans, trucks, crossovers, and more.

Fleet electrification can seem daunting since it’s such an important practice, but it doesn’t have to be.

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By Fred Fakkema, Vice President of Safety & Compliance at Zonar Systems

America’s record-breaking shortage of 80,000 truck drivers isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

Myriad contributing factors, including the demographic (primarily age and gender) of the current workforce, the sometimes-inflexible trucking lifestyle, and pay concerns have taken a front seat to the discussion.

Infrastructure hasn’t necessarily been at the heart of the driver shortage conversation. However, for an issue that has been around for years and has no immediate end in sight, longer-term solutions must be considered in tandem with the more immediate fixes outlined in the Trucking Action Plan. Addressing trucking’s decades-old infrastructure issue is among those long-term necessities.

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