This issue marks the beginning of the second year of operation for AUTOMOTIVE FLEET. The past 12 months have been exciting, not only from the standpoint of news, but also from the standpoint that AUTOMOTIVE FLEET has pioneered a new concept - a magazine designed and edited exclusively for passenger car fleet users.

The past year also has meant hard work. Many was the time when Ed Bobit and I spent long hours at the print shop readying an issue for press. The deadline is an awesome thing, particularly when you are covering an entire industry and attempting to bring your readers all the latest news that affects their operations.

We feel that the time and effort that has gone into AF has paid off. And apparently so do you - our readers. Over and over again I have heard such ringing comments as "tremendous job - keep up the terrific work;" "long overdue;" "best in the industry." Some of these comments we have, carried in our Letters To The Editor column. Others we have not, simply because the praise has come so fast and so heavy that frankly we blushed with embarrassment.

I never realized the tremendous vacuum that existed in the passenger car fleet field before AUTOMOTIVE FLEET came along. There are other fine magazines covering the fleet field, but most concentrate on the trucking end of the business and the passenger car fleet operators have been left high and dry. I feel that AF has eliminated this vacuum. And apparently so do our readers. Our circulation list continues to grow and so do the requests for reprints and information on the fleet field. I will never forget the glowing compliment paid AF by George Gulp, executive vice president of Service Leasing Corp. In a speech before the National Assn. of Fleet Administrators in Detroit; he put AUTOMOTIVE FLEET in the same class as Dunn's Review and the Harvard Business Review as a management type magazine that gets the fleet story across.

The mark of any good magazine is its reliability and integrity. I believe that AUTOMOTIVE FLEET has no peers in this area. If you've read it in AF it's the truth. Our readers were the first in the nation to learn about the Studebaker Avanti sports-type car and the Buick Riviera, General Motor's answer to the highly-successful Ford Thunderbird. The news about the Corvair convertivle and the Fairlane and Meteor station wagons was also carried first in AUTOMOTIVE FLEET.

In addition to the exclusives on the Avanti and the Riviera - which incidently were picked up by newspapers across the country and attributed to AUTOMOTIVE FLEET - readers learned of many other fleet firsts through AF. Some have yet to be confirmed, such as the Lincoln-Mercury plan to enter the leasing field.

One forecast that was particularly close to my heart wasn't borne out, but I claim extenuating circumstances. Last December I out-forecast the forecasters and predicted that 1962 would be a record automotive year in terms of sales. Everything was on schedule and sales were rolling at a record pace until that fateful Monday in May - the day the bottom fell out of the stock market. As one wag said, who can afford to buy a car after he's lost $200 per share on IBM? I firmly believe that if the market hadn't gone into a tailspin, 1962 would have been a record year. As it is, sales this year will be second best in history.

To cover the fleet business in our first year of operation, AF went to Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Akron, Detroit and even to Europe. It was an ambitious schedule. We covered the full scope of fleet operations from maintenance to top management. More is in store for next year. Hope you'll be with us.