Our long-time editor and fleet expert, Mike Antich, offers opinions and ideas on the overall commercial fleet industry and draws interesting comments from fleet managers and other industry professionals from across the country. Mike was inducted in the Fleet Hall of Fame in 2010.
There’s a direct correlation between vehicle weight and fuel economy. Vehicles get better fuel mileage when not loaded with unnecessary weight. An extra 100 lbs. in a vehicle could reduce mpg up to 2 %. One of the chief culprits responsible for accumulating unnecessary weight onboard a vehicle is drivers.
Vehicle abuse is an avoidable fleet cost. This abuse is wide-ranging, running the gamut from damage caused from fluid levels being low, missing PM intervals, driving on underinflated tires to extreme situations of jumping curbs or carelessly scraping the sides of parking structures.
Multinational corporations are changing the way they source and manage their vocational fleets to better identify true costs and to leverage opportunities to reduce spend and to maximize the operating efficiency of these specialized vehicles.
The pandemic has opened Pandora’s box on working from home – both good and bad. While it has yet to be determined whether this is long-term or short-term trend, it will impact fleet operations.
Two challenges facing fleets when ordering 2021-model vehicles are longer lead times and tight product availability, particularly with van and truck chassis. Constrained chassis availability was a top concern in CY-2020 and it has continued into 2021
As OEMs design and manufacture their next-gen connected vehicles, there are concerns about disruptions to connectivity that potentially could prevent access to the cloud with the possibility of impacting some vehicle functions.
Fleet management is a very complex profession, and true industry education is learned from on-the-job experience.
The key to reducing asset variability is to involve user groups early on and to gain their buy-in by framing the asset simplification discussion as ways to enhance user productivity and safety, and creating cost efficiencies that contribute to P&L objectives.
The difference between the most and least efficient drivers is a 30% difference in fuel consumption. Fuel is a fleet’s No. 1 operating expense and the best way to control this expenditure is to modify driving behavior, which is the major variability influencing fuel consumption.
Extended replacement cycles for short-term capital expenditure savings often have the unintended consequence of resulting in greater long-term expenses.
Managers of individual P&L (profit & losses) centers within an organization continue to have a tremendous influence over the way fleet policy is executed within their area of control. Fleet managers must partner with these stakeholders and give them latitude to influence fleet decisions to maximize the opportunity to achieve P&L objectives.
The best way to spec more ergonomic vehicles is by proactively identifying existing and potential issues and rectify them before they impact morale, or, in worst-case situations, result in injuries.
The proliferation of connected vehicle technology has created the capability to use vehicle-generated data in non-fleet-related business activities. Today, real-time telematics data is gaining a growing recognition as a valuable business intelligence (BI) tool for entities outside of fleet management to collect, integrate, and analyze business information.
One of the largest vocational fleet segments between the late 1940s and early 1960s was milk home-delivery fleets. It took 15 years for the milk home-delivery fleet segment to cycle from its peak to its near demise.
The COVID-19 pandemic is changing fleet safety protocols as revealed in my recent survey of commercial fleet managers that identified the top safety challenges currently facing their fleets.
