When Your Car Lease Is Over, What Should You Do Next?
April 23, 2022 - Car leases are stuffing more clauses into the contract that may make it much harder for you to trade in your lease or sell it to another dealer. At least five automakers are banning lessees from selling the car to any dealer outside their brand.
Consider buying out your lease if you don't want to lease or buy another new car right away. This is an especially advantageous strategy if you entered your lease before the 2020 pandemic began because your lease's residual is fixed in the contract.
Dealers love a repeat customer. If a dealer knows you have a desirable car they can sell and you'd like to keep leasing, you're likelier to get into a brand-new car sooner than later, and likely for the same price or better.
Rivian CEO Believes Battery Supply Chain Will Be the Next Disaster
April 24, 2022 - Rivian CEO R.J. Scaringe has the worst news yet saying, "Semiconductors are a small appetizer to what we are about to feel on battery cells over the next two decades."
Scaringe believes the compacted timeline for switching millions of personal vehicle sales from ICE to battery-electric is going to expose the lack of preparedness along the entire battery supply chain, from mining to producing the final packs.
Right now, "90% to 95% of the supply chain does not exist" to furnish the targets governments and OEMs have set for a decade from now.
5 Key Takeaways from the 2022 NAFA I&E
By Tod Trousdell, Fleet Marketing Consultant, RobertsTrousdell Marketing and Communications
As a marketing consultant working in the space for over a decade, NAFA I&E was my first fleet conference twelve years ago.
So, after a decidedly slow convention last year due to Covid, I was eager to see how it would fare with most travel restrictions lifted, and most fleet folks essentially back to normal after more than two years of pandemic-induced malaise.
With that in mind, here are five key takeaways from - and about - last week’s NAFA conference.
GM’s Electric BrightDrop Zero 600 Van Snags Distance Record With 260-Mile Run
April 22, 2022 - BrightDrop's Stephen Marlin achieved the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS® title for greatest distance traveled by an electric van on a single charge, in a BrightDrop Zevo 600, with a journey from New York City to Washington, D.C.
It could likely even travel farther on such localized routes, given the energy it could recoup through braking that it likely wasn't getting on its highway drive from New York to D.C.
BrightDrop has a deal with FedEx, aiming to provide 2,500 of the EV vans to the delivery giant, hence the FedEx livery on the record-setting van. BrightDrops claims a total of 25,000 reservations, and the Zevo 600 is currently being produced.
What If the Highway Could Charge Your Electric Vehicle?
April 23, 2022 - Next Spring, the nation’s first mile of public road that can charge electric vehicles as they drive over it will go online in Detroit.
The road isn’t meant to bring an EV back from empty: It charges at 20 kilowatts, roughly the same consumption rate an EV uses at highway speeds. The technology is the same used to wirelessly charge a smartphone—on a much larger scale. Proponents say that if every state adopted the tech it could unlock seamless coast-to-coast travel in an EV and cars that would run indefinitely without needing to stop for recharging.
