Q&A with Donlen’s Tom Callahan: An Exciting Time to Be In the Industry
By Janice Sutton
We always look forward to interviews with Tom Callahan, President of Donlen. He is very thoughtful and serious, but also has a genuine lightheartedness about him that is contagious.
In this recent interview, his focus was driver safety, which is clearly a passion of his. To wrap it up, we asked him to give us his thoughts on the future of fleet.
Tom says, “Driver behavior is a cause of 90 percent of accidents. So, if you really want to deal with safety, you need to monitor driver behavior. There are studies that said you can lose up to five seconds if you are on a cell phone. When you consider that a lot of these forward collisions happen in a second and the car moves several hundred feet in a second, five seconds is like the length of a football field or longer. That is not a lot of leeway.”
The future? Callahan says, “The future is going to be those people that can utilize data effectively. It is going to be those that have the great and flexible technology platforms. It is going to be folks that give great thought leadership and it is going to be the folks that can work and partner with people out there the best, because we can’t do it all alone.”
Used-Car Startups Lure Buyers Online Away From Dealer Lots
Transactions in the used-car market have always been a bit unpleasant.
Dealerships typically make low-ball offers. And buying or selling on your own can create the angst of getting stuck with a lemon or a bounced check. Enter the new wave of used-car companies.
Four of them -- Shift Technologies Inc., Beepi Inc., Vroom Inc. and Carvana LLC -- have piled into the business in the last few years, aiming to carve out a middle ground: providing much of the transaction security associated with dealerships and price competitiveness found online.
Element Showcases Technology Leadership With Presentation at Cassandra Summit 2016
Element Financial Corporation announced that Jim Peregord, vice president for Advanced Analytics at Element Fleet Management spoke at the Cassandra Summit 2016 in San Jose, Calif., the world’s largest gathering of Apache Cassandra developers, users and industry thought leaders.
Peregord’s presentation, “Building a Pluggable Analytics Stack with Cassandra as the Foundation,” shares how Element’s advanced analytics infrastructure uses Cassandra to explore new connections across multiple, interrelated data sets from internal and third-party sources.
Geotab and J.J. Keller & Associates, Inc. Partner to Provide Powerful Integrated Solution
Geotab and J.J. Keller & Associates, Inc. announced a new partnership to offer a solution combining Geotab’s telematics solutions and J.J. Keller’s electronic logging solution.
This partnership provides a powerful solution for fleets seeking in-cab technology that combines telematics and compliance, while addressing the needs of the market as the Electronic Logbook (ELog) becomes mandated for millions of drivers on December 18, 2017.
“Catering to the needs of the market and our customers is just as important to us at Geotab as it is in developing the most robust and comprehensive fleet management technology,” said Geotab CEO Neil Cawse. “This partnership with J.J. Keller will bring a new level of service to the industry, especially in light of the ELD mandate.”
Tesla is Using This Familiar Technology to Make its Autopilot Safer
In the wake of a series of Tesla crashes this year, the maker of electric cars said Sunday it is rolling out an upgrade to its semi-autonomous Autopilot feature that may help make it safer to use.
The company said that although its vehicles' existing software may cause a Tesla on Autopilot to scrape against a car that's partially in its lane, or to ram into an obstacle that another driver ahead has swerved to avoid, an update that will be rolled out around the world in the coming weeks will address both problems — as well as a host of others.
It will give radar technology a more active role in Autopilot — a feature drivers can enable to allow the car to stay within its lane and to keep it from hitting other vehicles.
