After temporarily suspending its flagship DriveReady Advantage™ open enrollment program to avoid health exposure related to the COVID-19 crisis, the company has introduced additional social distancing components to continue providing fleets with essential driver safety training.
Driving Dynamics Inc., a provider of advanced performance driver safety training, coaching and risk services for organizations that operate vehicle-fleets in North America and around the globe, has announced the open enrollment format of its foundational skills-based driver safety program will resume with a phased roll-out starting in June.
The DriveReady Advantage™ (DriveReady) course now includes heightened safety protocols, format changes and new virtual options to adhere to social distancing guidelines and accommodate policy mandates and comfort levels of its customer base.
Read the release at Driving Dynamics.
By Mark Boada, Executive Editor
It’s a tough time for the business-to-business car sharing industry. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic chilled the market, the by-the-hour rental business was suffering.
In February, Share Now, born by the merger of BMW’s and Daimler-Benz’ car sharing divisions and operating as Car2Go, closed its doors in the U.S. and Canada, after exiting all cities in Europe except Brussels, Florence and London last December. Then, in April, GM, announced that it was shutting down Maven, its car sharing division, citing as its reasons the pandemic’s effect on demand and that the business was “not profitable.”
Alex Thibault is vice president of Vulog and general manager of its North American operations. Vulog is the leading maker of car sharing platform technology and counts some of the biggest names in the ride-hailing and rental car companies in the world. In this interview with FMW, Thibault comments on the state of the business-to-business, or B2B, car sharing business and the broader car sharing industry as well.
Fleet managers and fleet drivers today are dealing with more than they had ever imagined, and eDriving’s COVID-19 Resource Center offers a bunch of great tips to mitigate current risks.
Will we have AI self-driving cars that will allow us to take a wild ride on a dangerous road, doing so by telling the AI to maximally take risks on such roads, giving the humans quite a thrill (one presumes)?
For now, the automakers and self-driving tech firms have their hands full with getting self-driving cars to safely take people to the local grocery store, and thus this inquisitiveness about coping with especially dangerous roads is considered an edge or corner case (not something to be dealt with right now).
In the future, you might see advertising for brands of AI self-driving cars that showcase they can readily drive on scandalously dangerous roads, which might become a marketing pitch to differentiate one AI driving system from another. Take a look at a recently reported list of the Top Ten alleged most dangerous roads in the world.
Read the article at Forbes.
Intended to help customers restart their business and get back to work with safe, sustainable and cost-effective mobility solutions, the new ‘The Journey Goes On’ proposition will be launched progressively across Arval’s eight largest territories (France, Italy, UK, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Poland and Belgium) over the coming weeks and adapted to local customer needs.
It’s built on three main pillars: Adapted operations to comply with social-distancing and driver safety, Flexible, shorter-term leasing solutions available right now to help businesses restart, Sustainable and alternative mobility solutions.
Alain van Groenendael, Arval Group chairman and CEO, said: “Arval changed its brand signature a few months ago to ‘For the many journeys in life”. More than ever, we believe that our mission is to help our customers, their drivers and individuals, to face the new journey we are all engaging in. They are all calling for more flexibility, as well as more safety. We want to be there for them, and that’s what ‘The Journey Goes On’ is all about.”
Read the article at International Fleet World.