If you have excess vehicles in your fleet, this is still a great time to sell. The hot used vehicle market is expected to last at least through the summer.
April 5, 2022 - General Motors and Honda will work together to build a number of affordable EVs using GM's next-generation Ultium battery technology on a new global architecture.
The partnership will is expected to potentially drive down the cost of some jointly-developed EVs to below $30,000, according to GM's Vice President of Electric and Autonomous Vehicles, Ken Morris.
With Honda historically focusing on hybrids and research on both solid-state battery and fuel cell research, it makes perfect sense to partner with another automaker already pushing forward with electrification rather than invest completely on its own. The first Ultium-powered vehicles built on this shared architecture will go on sale beginning in 2027.
This week we’re coming to you from NAFA I&E in Columbus, Ohio, where we are having a fantastic time! The sessions are thought-provoking, the exhibit floor is busy and we are just incredibly happy to see so many of our fleet friends (and meet a few new ones). We will be coming away from the conference with a lot of great new videos (and other content), which will we begin featuring next week.
In this issue we highlight RTA’s impressive example of how to make fleets succeed through innovative software, which you can check out here. By the way, we are very much looking forward to their Fleet Success Summit next week in Phoenix!
Inspiration
We've also got a great article from Ed Pierce on how "no company has worked with light and medium-fleet businesses to comprehensively tackle all of the requirements for electrification—until Inspiration," according to Inspiration Mobility CEO Josh Green. You can read it here.
Ted Roberts
President
By Michael Quimby, Chief Operating Officer at TFS, an OnPoint Group Company
When it comes to managing, optimizing and maintaining our material handling equipment fleet, such as the forklifts relied upon by our nation’s largest manufacturers and distributors, our approach is still stuck in the 1990s.
The fleet management playbook for on-road trucks and commercial vehicles has matured rapidly over the last 25 years. We’ve made great strides when it comes to operational productivity, vehicle and equipment safety, and the environmental footprint we leave behind. The progress we’ve made as a fleet management industry has been inspiring to watch, and it gets me excited to see what’s next for the industry in the years ahead.
But for some reason, the ways in which we monitor and manage our other important fleet - our material handling equipment vehicles - still mirror the tactics utilized by fleet managers decades ago. Systems and processes are incredibly outdated, lacking in investment and efficiency, and rarely if ever evaluated for potential improvement.
By Ed Pierce, Contributing Editor
Data is one of the most powerful tools that companies can use in 2022.
In order to learn more about the future of data and EVs, we sat down with Jeff Davis, senior director of IVY ecosystems business development at BlackBerry to discuss the newest product they’re co-developing with AWS.
Davis walked us through IVY, an intelligent middleware system designed to alleviate the problem for OEMs and developers to pull data from EVs across their entire fleet.
Here’s what we learned ~