Possibility of Trade Wars Raise Concerns About Auto Sales
The auto industry is expecting a strong sales year in 2018, but analysts warn a trade war could derail that.
Fleet sales, including sales to rental customers and commercial customers who purchase more than a single vehicle, have been growing steadily since 2014 and in the first two months accounted for more than 24% of total industry sales, according to figures compiled by J.D. Power & Associates, said Thomas King, senior vice president of data and analytics.
"Part of the reason is that more individual customers have drifted into the used-car markets, looking for deals among the growing number of lightly-used vehicles coming off lease, but it also a sign that what is traditionally cyclical industry has reached another point of the industry’s sales cycle that indicates sales are likely to slow."
Read the article at The Detroit Bureau.
Miami Tops in ‘Distracted’ Cities, NJ Takes State Title
Distracted driving is a recognized problem – with nine deaths each day – and it is not limited to texting teens, but includes where are those drivers most likely to be traveling the roads, which appears mostly likely to be somewhere on the East Coast.
A new study shows that East Coast drivers are more likely to engage in some form of distracted driving than those on the West Coast. When broken down by city and state, Miami drivers top the list and New Jersey drivers hold the “state” title.
The findings come from the “Heads Up, Phones Down: Distracted Driving Intervention” report. It looked at a total of 45 billion miles driven by Life360 users and claims to be the largest distracted driving survey to date.
Read the article in The Detroit Bureau
Donlen to Present Six Educational Sessions at NAFA 2018 I&E
Donlen announces that 2018 NAFA I&E attendees will have the opportunity to learn from Donlen’s experts during six educational sessions at this year’s conference in Anaheim, California.
The 2018 NAFA I&E offers fleet professionals a full week of high-quality fleet management educational sessions designed to educate attendees on current fleet management tactics and trends. The educational sessions cover a wide range of topics including fleet management best practices and insights and actionable steps that fleet professionals can take to be ready for the latest trends in fleet, such as mobility.
Uber’s Self-Driving Crash Will Not be the Last
As companies like General Motors, Ford, Aptiv, Zoox, and Waymo continue to test their self-driving vehicles on public roads, there will be more dust-ups, fender-benders, and crashes that maim and kill.
Autonomous vehicles run off hundreds of thousands of lines of code, sensors and lidar - robots don’t understand eye contact or waves or nods. Their mistakes will seem mysterious to the human eye, and alarming.
“The argument is that the rate of accidents is supposed to go down, when autonomy is matured to a certain level,” says Mike Wagner, co-founder and CEO of Edge Case Research, which helps robotics companies build more robust software. “But how we get from here to there is not always entirely clear, especially if it needs a lot of on-road testing.”
Read the article at Wired.
Surviving Dieselgate, Volkswagen Moves Into the Electrification Future
After one of the largest scandals in automotive history, Volkswagen has embarked on the largest program of electrification in the global car industry, pledging to spend $25 billion to develop battery-powered or hybrid variants of every one of its models by 2030.
CEO Matthias Müller’s goal is to make EVs, currently concentrated at the high end of the market, cheap and commonplace, inspired by Volkswagen’s own 1960s Beetle which was instrumental in bringing mass-market driving to postwar Europe.
"Volkswagen is “absolutely more ambitious on EVs than the other global giants,” says Max Warburton, an automotive analyst at Bernstein Research in London. “You would have wondered a year ago to what extent Volkswagen was going to follow through on their headlines, but it’s really happening, and they’re serious.”
Read the article at Bloomberg Businessweek.
