Save a Trip to the Gas Station With Fuel Delivery Service
For many drivers, a trip to the gas station is a forgettable inconvenience that occurs once or twice a week. The solution: a Silicon Valley company known as Yoshi, a gas-delivery start-up billing themselves as “Uber for gasoline,” functioning like a mobile gas station, using “field technicians” to fill up vehicles when they’re not being driven.
Yoshi has also begun offering customers other gas station staples, such as oil changes, tire checks, car washings and brake pad replacements. Using the company’s app customers interact with field technicians and an artificial intelligence bot named “Rachel,” which helps them schedule services.
Read the article at The Washington Post.
New Car Sales Ballooning in China and Leveling in the U.S.
China is the world's largest car market, selling 29 million light vehicles a year. By 2025, China's new car sales will be double those of the United States, analysts said. To put that in perspective, about 17.2 million new light vehicles were sold last year in the U.S., according to Kelley Blue Book data.
Detroit's car companies must focus on growing their sales in China if they want to sustain total profits enough to succeed elsewhere in the world.
Read the article at Detroit Free Press.
California Strikes Back Against Trump’s Auto Pollution Rollback
The Trump administration’s plan to weaken fuel-efficiency rules for cars, is one of President Trump’s most consequential environmental rollbacks to date. The proposal unveiled last week will let cars pollute more, while stripping California of its right to set its own air-quality rules.
The administration’s proposal “is contrary to the facts and the law,” the California document says, before refuting point by point the Trump administration’s arguments for weakening the nation’s long-term goals for making vehicles more fuel efficient and less polluting.
Read the article at The New York Times.
Feds Investigate Seatbelt Component Related to Ford F-150 Fires
According to a document posted on the website of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, federal regulators are investigating the possible failure of a seat-belt component on 18 models of 2015 Ford F-150 pickups. Three F-150 pickups were destroyed by fire and two others sustained damage.
A Ford spokeswoman said the automaker takes “the safety of our customers very seriously. We are investigating the matter and will cooperate with the agency, as we always do.”
Read the article at Forbes.
Risky Business
In Safety & Risk this week, Art Liggio urges fleet safety professionals to become acquainted with an eye-opening report that examines drivers’ attitudes toward risk behaviors. Is it any surprise that texting is the #1 threat? Art asks, “…what is your company doing to mitigate this texting issue?”
One aspect of fleet mobility management is car-sharing, but how does that really work? Find out where we stand in Why Business Fleets Are Slow to Embrace Car-Sharing, and What They’re Missing.
Don’t miss John Wysseier’s second blog in his new Disruptive Leadership series: The Internet of Things: One of Today’s Disruptive Battlefronts.
Janice Sutton
Editor in Chief
