Saltzgiver: Urgent Reasons for Government Fleets to Outsource Routine Maintenance – Part One of Two
By Mark Boada, Executive Editor
A “perfect storm” is forcing government fleets to outsource an activity that the overwhelming majority still complete in-house: routine vehicle maintenance.
That’s the outlook from Steve Saltzgiver, a 30-year-plus fleet management executive who for the past six years has been a consultant with Mercury Associates, in an hour-long interview with Fleet Management Weekly.
The interview came on the heels of the release last week of a report by OmniGov IQ, a fleet market intelligence company, explaining that as vehicles have become more technologically advanced “the work of maintaining government fleet vehicles has become more high-tech and specialized, and many government agencies don’t have specialists on their staffs that can do this work."
$101 Million Awarded in Negligent Entrustment Case
Earlier this month, the jury in a case against Frac Tech Services International in the district court in Upshur County, Texas, awarded Joshua Patterson about $101 million.
Although the jury found the trucker to be 70 percent at fault and FTS 30 percent responsible for the crash, the big payout came when the jury calculated Frac Tech’s negligence at $75 million.
The lawsuit claims that Bill Acker was driving under the influence of drugs before and at the time of the collision. Despite FTS knowing about several policies that prohibited Acker from driving, the company hired him anyway. Essentially, the case was based around the idea that FTS should have never “recklessly employed” Acker, let alone entrusted him in driving a truck.
Read the article at Land Line Magazine.
Concern Grows Over Autonomous Vehicle Safety
The fact that a crash of a driverless car receives extraordinary media attention, even if the autonomous vehicle is not at fault, may have fueled the results of an online survey that found that 61 percent of Americans said they were not ready to ride in self-driving cars.
Consumer groups are pushing back against what they say is a flawed effort in Congress to regulate the vehicles, although 94 percent of car crashes are caused by human error and most traffic fatalities in 2016 were caused by three factors that fully autonomous cars might eliminate: distracted driving, drunken driving and speeding.
Read the article at The Washington Post.
Ford’s Tiny Truck May Soon be Available in the U.S.
Ford is considering bringing a subcompact pickup truck to the US. It will be built with the same unibody that will be used on the next-generation Ford Focus.
This new subcompact pickup isn't exclusively for the US. It's actually a replacement for the Brazilian-market Courier, which was based on a 1998 Fiesta platform. It has a regular cab design and a modest box out back with a load capacity about 1,500 pounds.
Read the article at MSN.
Frisco’s Hall Park Workers Look Forward to New Self-Driving Service
Texas has positioned itself to become a leader in the world of autonomous vehicles. Frisco, the fastest growing town in the nation, will soon have seven bright orange autonomous vans from Silicon Valley-based Drive.ai, picking up passengers at six designated spots within Frisco's Hall Park.
Drive.ai has taken many precautions to keep passengers safe. Its vans are connected to three mobile networks, a redundancy that ensures backup if one were to fail. It placed street signs at pickup and drop-off locations. A message board on each side of the van helps explain to pedestrians and drivers what the van is thinking.
Read the article at Dallas News.
