A Call to Action: Some Final Thoughts on Marketing Scams
By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer
Throughout this “marketing scam” series of columns, I focused on generally-accepted marketing tactics that waste the limited dollars of the marketing budget and that deliver few sales opportunities.
This final segment is devoted to two final activities that offer questionable value: Fish in a Barrel, where "exclusive" executive events are offered for a limited number of sales representatives to attend, and Question That Award Sponsorship (or Entry), where dubious award companies bestow "awards" for a steep price.
Here’s Why V2V Is So Enormously Important For Driverless Cars
Driverless cars promise to save lives by driving better than constantly-texting, easily-distracted, sometimes-even-intoxicated humans, but - like any married couple knows - the cars can't reach their true potential if they don't communicate with each other.
Human senses are still better than the radars, lidars and cameras in driverless cars when it comes to things like classifying objects, edge detection, lane tracking and visibility range, according to a new report out of the University of Michigan's Sustainable Worldwide Transportation research team.
Researchers Hack a Self-Driving Car by Putting Stickers on Street Signs
Researchers at University of Washington, University of Michigan, Stony Brook University, and UC Berkeley have figured out how to hack self-driving cars by putting stickers on street signs.
Starting by analyzing the algorithm the vision system uses to classify images, they used a number of different attacks to manipulate signs in order to trick machine learning models into misreading them.
For instance, they printed up stickers to trick the vision system an autonomous car would use into reading a stop sign as a 45-mile-per-hour sign, the consequences of which would obviously be very bad in the real world.
Q&A: LeasePlan’s David Dahm: How Will FASB Changes and Interest Rate Hikes Affect Your Fleet?
By Janice Sutton
David Dahm is Chief Financial Officer at LeasePlan USA. A 35-year veteran of the automotive fleet management industry, 29 of those years with LeasePlan USA, he is clearly an expert on financial matters affecting our industry.
We were happy to have had the opportunity to talk with Dahm about the newest Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) lease accounting rule changes and what fleet managers need to know in 2017.
We also asked him to consult his crystal ball and give us his thoughts on where interest rates may be headed. The short answer? Up. So, what do we do now?
Toyota and Mazda Join Forces on Electric Vehicles. Is this the End of the Road for Gas Cars?
European moves to mark the end of the road for diesel and gas-powered cars are putting pressure on carmakers to not get left behind in the shift towards electric vehicles, analysts said.
In a further sign of those pressures, Toyota Motor Corp and Mazda Motor Corp on Friday announced they would join forces to develop electric vehicle technologies and build a $1.6 billion assembly plant in the U.S.
