Emergency Responders Offer New Ways to Alert Drivers They’re on the Road, Using ‘Lights and Sirens We’ve Had for Decades’
What if you could get a real-time alert in your car as soon as a nearby fire truck turns on its emergency lights? HAAS Alert’s Safety Cloud partners with 3,600 agencies across the U.S. to provide digital alerts to drivers, showing them the location of nearby emergency response vehicles.
Any vehicle made by Stellantis in 2018 or later already come fully equipped with the technology. “The way Stellantis did it, is that they rolled it out so that even vehicles that you may have owned in 2018, all of a sudden, you start receiving safety notifications without having to pay anything extra, without having to bring your car to the dealer. It’s all done through software over the air,” Hohs said.
Wrap-Up: 2024 Work Truck Week
By Tod Trousdell, Fleet Marketing Consultant and Partner/RobertsTrousdell Communications
While this year’s NTEA Work Truck Week hit an all-time attendance record of 15,790 attendees and 536 exhibitors, let’s just say the 2024 version of Work Truck Week was a little less ‘electric.’
Seemingly gone are the days when the mere mention of electrification sent many fleets – pressured by corporate ESG initiatives and government edicts – blindly into EV adoption before anyone knew how to successfully implement them.
“EVs are going to be an important part of the story...there’s no denying what a game changer they are,” said David Hayward, Global Fleet Director for ABM. “It’s just that I think it’s going to take a while for EVs to develop fully and that’s going to require a lot of different options to help fleets meet sustainability goals along the way.
Inspiration Mobility, Part 2: Overcoming Obstacles to Electrification with an EV-First Approach
By Ed Pierce, Fleet Management Weekly’s Brand Acceleration
As more interest in adding EVs to fleets surges, fleet professionals are running into roadblocks on electrification. There are obstacles that have prevented some fleets from taking the plunge to electrify.
The transition to electric vehicles can be intimidating and complex for fleets who have invested time and money into optimizing an ICE fleet, notes Josh Green, founder and CEO of Inspiration Mobility.
Inspiration brings EV leasing, EV-first fleet management, and charging under one roof to accelerate and de-risk the transition to EVs.
Ford Patents Built-In Pickup Bed Rack With Stowaway Rails and It Sure Seems Handy
Ford's latest patent could drastically increase the usability of pickup truck beds, allowing for customers to nearly double the size of their cargo capacity at the push of a button.
Under normal circumstances, the rails would stay retracted, inside the bed walls. But when deployed, actuators could extend the bed rails up on either side. With just the rails in their extended position, owners can store longer items like lumber or ladders—think anything too long to normally fit in the bed—horizontally across the bed, freeing up space underneath for other storage.
FreeWire’s New Program Offers Free, Custom EV Chargers and its First Client May Surprise You
FreeWire Technologies announced a clever new Accelerate Program that essentially installs and manages its EV charger technology at no cost to businesses, making profits elsewhere while speeding up the adoption rate on new installations. The program’s first business to sign up is surprising but encouraging.
Essentially, FreeWire is paying businesses like Chevron, the first company to sign up for the Accelerate Program, for use of its property to install its charger technology. FreeWire, in turn, operates and maintains the equipment and takes the profits from EV charging sessions.
