All good things eventually come to an end. So, too, will today’s abnormally high used-vehicle prices. Today's resale values are an anomaly caused by a decrease in used-vehicle inventory in the wholesale market, resulting from the extremely low sales of new vehicles from 2009-2011. You need to educate management that today’s resale values will decline. Otherwise, you run the risk of being management’s future scapegoat for declining resale values due to their misperceptions of the market.
Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical cannabis (marijuana) or have decriminalized it. What are the fleet ramifications of drivers operating a company-provided vehicle while using medical marijuana under the care of a physician? What are the corporate liability issues if a driver with a medical marijuana prescription is involved in a preventable accident? Let's address these questions and determine what you can do to minimize your corporate liability exposure.
A one-size-fits-all approach to truck specifications is an ergonomic minefield, which could have litigious consequences. In addition, there are increased field complaints about “less-than-ergonomic” upfit decisions. Besides health issues, poor ergonomics is also a key contributor to preventable accidents. Proactively resolving ergonomic issues can have a significant impact in reducing workers’ comp costs, improving productivity, and decreasing fatigue-induced driver errors.
The recent breathtaking increase in gasoline and diesel prices gives us a reality check as to how quickly fuel can dramatically increase fleet operating expenses. With fuel prices at a near all-time high and ongoing strong resale values decreasing depreciation costs, will fuel costs overtake depreciation as the No. 1 fleet expense in 2012, as it almost did in 2006?
Every fleet manager is feeling the pressure to reduce costs. The best place to have maximum impact is to reduce overall fleet size and/or modify vehicle composition. A fleet's total cost is directly proportional to the total number of vehicles in operation, which drives all fixed and operating costs, such as fuel, replacement tire expenses, depreciation, accident repair costs, etc. If you can reduce overall fleet size, all other cost categories will decrease correspondingly.
Between 2001 and 2010, there were a record 38,000 new regulations published in the Federal Register. One sobering caveat is that these regulations do not include the even larger number of regulations introduced by state, county, and municipal governments, along with local regulatory agencies. Invariably, this multitude of regulations has impacted fleet management.
Many of the challenges facing U.S. fleet managers are identical to the challenges facing your counterparts managing fleets elsewhere in the world. Many of these fleet trends extend beyond the U.S. and are offshoots of much larger global trends. Oftentimes, best practices in fleet management emerge from outside the U.S., which is good reason for you to familiarize yourself with what's occurring in other global fleet markets.
Overloading is an ongoing industry problem. Besides violating numerous state and federal regulations, when a vehicle is overloaded its emergency handling capability is reduced, operating expenses increase, and service lives decrease. Statistics show that overloaded and improperly loaded trucks are among the leading causes of truck accidents and the number one cause of unscheduled maintenance.
More than 600 fleets currently use biodiesel, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. This number promises to grow based on several recent announcements.
Corporate procurement departments are becoming the engines of change in fleet management at Fortune 500 companies. The emergence of strategic sourcing in the 1990s is rapidly altering corporate purchasing and increasingly forcing change in fleet purchasing and the supplier selection process.
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