Fleet Europe °116 by Nexus Communication

116 04/2020

FOR INTERNATIONAL FLEET & MOBILITY LEADERS

SHARED MOBILITY How to build your shared fleet?

SAFETY

How safe is in-car infotainment?

NEW ENERGIES

10 Steps to a safer fleet

Nexus communication - Fleet Europe #116 - Periodic magazine - APRIL 2020 - Deposit Office X

CONNECTED

Top 10 fleet models from ‘Geneva’

FROM FLEET TO MOBILITY AS A SERVICE • From vehicle management to people management • How to set up your mobility strategy? • What MaaS innovations to select? • Looking for the ideal MaaS aggregator

COVID-19: SPREAD THE IDEAS, NOT THE VIRUS! Stay up to date on www.fleeteurope.com

MaaS 4-21 4

Stay safe – and look forward

The global spread of the coronavirus is impacting our societies and economies as well as our personal lives. The post-corona world will be different from the one that went before – also in terms of mobility.

Where MaaS is happening and why

Why MaaS doesn’t need to replace the car Of the many predictions that are thrown into the fleet ecosystem, “mobility as an alternative to the car” might be the most radical one.

10 Get all aboard with your MaaS strategy Without user buy-in, your MaaS solution is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. So how does your company build a MaaS strategy that motivates your employees?

13 Fragmentation to unification An abundance of start-ups across Europe is offering a profusion of MaaS platforms – but they’re all very different. But what commonly happens is that most offerings are a combination of cloud and user apps, which makes it easy for companies to be up and running super quick.

Top 10 conditions of a good MaaS proposal

20 Who will win the aggregation race? Aggregation is the essence of MaaS. And yet ‘total aggregation’ – offering all options available (at one location, let alone globally) – remains elusive. Those are the outlines of the paradox at the heart of MaaS. Can the riddle be solved?

SHARED MOBILITY

16 Meet Jarno Pajunen of Nokia, European Smart Mobility Manager of the Year and Fleet & Mobility Manager of the Year.

22-27

24 5 Shared mobility innovation for today and

tomorrow

Shared mobility encompasses traditional means of transport like bikes and cars, but also more innovative ones like selfdriving shuttles and passenger drones. Here’s an overview of some of the more interesting options on the market.

26 Reconciling shared mobility with public transport Do new urban mobility solutions provide an existential threat to traditional public transport, or are they the lifeline that brings mass transit into the 21st century? Read the answer.

18 5 steps to obtain a mobility mandate

COLOPHON PROJECT COORDINATOR: Céline Gilson

SALES: David Baudeweyns, Elke Leën, Daniel Savigny, Aline Verpoorten, Estelle Remacle

EDITORS: Benjamin Uyttebroeck, Dieter Quartier, Yves Helven, Frank Jacobs

EVENT: Vincent Degives, Virginie Emonts PUBLISHERS: Caroline Thonnon, Thierry Degives

CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Bland, Shane Curran, Jonathan Manning, Anne Özdelen, Alison Pittaway, Mark Sutcliffe

PICTURES: ©Shutterstock

FLEET EUROPE #116

CHIEF EDITOR: Steven Schoefs

LAYOUT: Cible - www.cible.be

MARKETING: Sven Van Rossum, Benoit Delisse

TO CONTACT OUR TEAM: FirstletterfirstnameLastname@nexuscommunication.be 2

NEW ENERGIES 30

Jumping from diesel to EVs without trying PHEVs As tax systems change and technology improves, fleets are exploring the opportunity to transition directly from internal combustion engines to pure battery power. Plug-in hybrid (PHEV) cars now face twin threats.

AUTONOMOUS

Yes, carsharing will go on, but it will be different

Why OEMs hit the brakes to manage autonomous expectations Fully autonomous company cars which allow drivers to send emails and conduct virtual meetings on the road are still some way off, but robotaxis and driverless shuttle buses are just around the corner.

REMARKETING 38

Coronavirus affects Turkish car market Second-hand vehicle prices in Turkey rallied to record highs in the beginning of the year. Now market dynamics are changing amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Discover more news, features and analyses on the Fleet Europe ecosystem on our website

28 Here is the top 10 new innovative fleet models

SPREAD THE IDEAS, NOT THE VIRUS! The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the world in an unprecedented situation. Every continent and every business sector is affected. With more and more countries in lockdown, businesses closed and travel bans in place, transporting people and goods is now extremely limited.

33 In-car infotainment more dangerous than alcohol

The unpredictable magnitude and duration of the coronavirus crisis make it impossible to predict the consequences. However, the need for mobility will not disappear and once COVID-19 has been overcome, our industry will re-emerge, driven by flexibility and innovation. It is our role to go on informing you about the impact of COVID-19 on our ecosystem. But it is also our duty to listen to you and make our community even stronger. So don’t hesitate to share your testimonials and your ideas by emailing our editor-in-chief sschoefs@nexuscommunication.be.

Thierry Degives & Caroline Thonnon Publishers & CEOs Nexus Communication

34 10 steps to a safer fleet

FLEET EUROPE www.fleeteurope.com • Fleet Europe Magazine • @Fleet_Europe • FleetEurope • contact@nexuscommunication.be Fleet Europe is published by Nexus Communication SA - Parc Artisanal 11-13, B-4671 Barchon (Belgium) - T +32 4 387 87 71 - Fax +32 4 387 90 63 Fleet Europe is registered and copyrighted trademark. Reproduction rights (texts, advertisements, pictures) reserved for all countries. Received documents will not be returned. By submitting them, the author implicitly authorizes their publication.

FLEET EUROPE #116

ADVERTISERS

MaaS

DEAR MEMBER OF THE FLEET EUROPE COMMUNITY, These are difficult times. The global spread of the coronavirus is impacting our societies and economies as well as our personal lives. And, although it’s too early to calculate the damage, we can already say that the fleet and mobility industry is hit especially hard. The various lockdowns put in place to combat the COVID-19 pandemic have effectively shut down our core business – moving people and goods from A to B. Global airline traffic has collapsed by up to 90% compared to the same period last year. Ridership on public transport systems in Europe and North America has plunged by more than 80%. Perversely, the crisis seems designed to hurt MaaS and shared mobility solutions the most. Their USP consists of combining mobility modes and sharing them with other users – exactly what a virus-averse public is now keen to avoid. That reluctance to use MaaS, shared mobility and public transport will linger for some time after we’ve overcome this crisis. Another legacy will be the increased adoption of remote working and digital meetings. Nevertheless, when normal life re-emerges and the economy restarts, the need for efficient mobility will also resurface.

Steven Schoefs, Editor-in-chief, Fleet Europe

However, the post-corona world will be different from the one that went before – also in terms of mobility. The main difference: users will have more exacting demands when it comes to the sanitary aspects of transportation. They will select suppliers not just on their ability to deliver solutions that are efficient in terms of time and cost, but that are also excellent in terms of health and safety. That will be the new balance that mobility customers will be demanding, and mobility suppliers should be providing. COVID-19 will have a severe impact on the global economy – the World Bank predicts many major economies could experience negative growth this year – but crises are also opportunities for new beginnings. Let’s take this shock as a chance to rethink and remodel our mobility paradigm. Post crisis, people and goods will still need to move from A to B. The solutions will need to be more digital and resilient, and the customer experience more seamless and personalised than ever before. Stay safe – and look forward!

FLEET EUROPE #116

To stay up to date about the impact of COVID-19 on our Fleet & Mobility ecosystem, follow us online www.fleeteurope.comm

Ready to move you Mobility your way As a leading global provider, our international scale, local expertise and market leading technology ensure that you have the right mobility solutions to keep your business moving.

MaaS

WHERE MAAS IS HAPPENING AND WHY Frank Jacobs

Haarlem train station in the Netherlands, where rail operator NS has built an exemplary MaaS offering on the back of the country’s excellent public transport network.

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Shwetha Surender, Mobility Industry Principal at Frost & Sullivan: “If a city is big enough, and the public transport service is good enough, MaaS will happen.”

Europe leads the world in MaaS, but that leadership is distributed unevenly – and as yet rather sparsely – across the map. Three takeaways: MaaS requires excellent public transport; it’s blossoming in medium-sized cities; and it will soon spread beyond Europe.

“MaaS is perhaps not spreading as fast as many had hoped,” says Shwetha Surender, Mobility Industry Principal at global consultants Frost & Sullivan. “Mobility as a Service is only viable if you can provide those services at a scale that’s large enough and a cost that’s low enough for them to be competitive with – and as convenient as – driving your own car. That’s a big challenge. And that challenge can only be met with an excellent public transport system as a backbone. That’s the make-or-break condition for MaaS.”

Must-have Good public transport is a musthave, but for MaaS to happen, more is needed. “You need to add services and fill in the gaps. One player who is doing this quite well is NS, the national rail operator in the Netherlands. They offer a good public train network throughout the entire country and have tied

that in not just with the public buses, but also with shared cars, bikes and e-scooters. Their NS Business Card is a success because of it.” The excellent infrastructure benefits not just NS itself, but also other players in the Netherlands, says Ms Surender: “XXImo and MobilityMixx are just two providers of corporate MaaS solutions in what is a very vibrant mobility ecosystem in the Netherlands.” However, the Dutch example is also the exception, at least for now. “Take Germany next door. There you have DB as the comparable provider of rail services throughout the country. But Germany proves that rail is just one component of the MaaS ecosystem. In order to provide comprehensive mobility services, DB needs to align with powerful local mobility providers such as BVG in Berlin or MVG in Munich. That element, which is absent in the Netherlands,

“And then there’s the city of Augsburg, also in Germany, which took the initiative itself to build a MaaS solution. As elsewhere, the local public transport network provides the backbone.” That’s why you won’t find MaaS in rural areas – they simply lack the density of public transport options that bigger cities provide. But there are other factors at play – notably in terms of legislation and regulation. “From a fleet operator perspective, MaaS can become an interesting option if the government provides the regulatory context for it. As has happened in Belgium, for example, where a law was passed to enable corporate drivers to opt for a mobility budget instead of the company car,” says Ms Karjalainen.

Parking space

makes it much harder to develop and roll out nationwide MaaS solutions on the back of the rail network.”

Urban pockets Outside the Netherlands, MaaS is available in small, urban pockets; typically pilot projects that are thriving and building the case for MaaS profitability one step at a time. “Of course, there’s Helsinki, where Whim has been very successful over the past three and a half years,” Ms Surender points out. “They’ve managed to gather the support of the government and of the various stakeholders in the local mobility ecosystem. Okay, the uptake rates are perhaps not as high as they might have hoped, but they’re doing as well as can be expected.” Helsinki is also one of the examples Piia Karjalainen, Secretary General of the MaaS Alliance, has in mind. “Other examples include Vienna, where there’s

a good MaaS ecosystem, and Antwerp, which has also built up a really good partnership for MaaS and is currently one of the thought leaders on MaaS development.” There are some similarities between these places: “They’re not the biggest cities, but they have good public transport – and local governments which are open-minded and pro-active when it comes to mobility innovation. Perhaps it’s easier for smaller cities to get to grips with MaaS, as their smaller size means that they’re more agile than the very largest cities.”

White-label solution Not that those larger cities are entirely deprived of movement on MaaS, Ms Surender says. “In the US, there were MaaS pilots in Denver and Los Angeles, but those have now ended. Tokyo intends to develop a pilot but isn’t quite there yet. Last year, Jelbi was launched in Berlin. It’s a white-label solution developed by MaaS platform Trafi, in collaboration with BVG. It’s too early to evaluate the uptake. But the solution is quite expansive: adding taxis, bikesharing and carsharing to the public transport network. It will launch in Munich soon.” MVG and Trafi have yet to announce a name for the MaaS solution, which will launch later this year.

Low Emission Zones will be another major driver of further MaaS expansion, Ms Surender suggests, but there are also cruder, more immediate ways in which local governments can disincentivise classic ‘one-driver-one-vehicle’ mobility: “Restricting parking space is a very effective way to do that. For example, from 2018 new builds in London no longer need to provide parking space if they’re close enough to a Tube station.” “In Tokyo, there are only 5 parking spaces for every 100 cars; and if you can’t prove that you have access to a parking space, you can’t get a licence for a car. Hong Kong has invested so much in public transport that most residents live less than a kilometre from a station in the network. As a result, only 12% of all passenger kilometres in Hong Kong are done by private car.” Even though the conditions are right, there is no significant MaaS uptake in East Asia as yet. “Most of the players are still in Europe, but it is likely that they will expand globally.” In fact, Ms Surender is confident enough to make a bold prediction: “If a city is big enough, and the public transport service is good enough, MaaS will happen. Corporate MaaS solutions will play a big role, because companies increasingly want to lower their CO2 footprint – and continue to reduce cost.”

FLEET EUROPE #116

Overview of selected MaaS projects throughout Europe, showing hotspots in Western, Southern and Northern Europe, and ‘notspots’ in Eastern Europe, image: MaaS Alliance (https://maas-alliance.eu/maas-in-action/)

MaaS

WHY MAAS DOESN’T NEED TO REPLACE THE COMPANY CAR Yves Helven

FLEET EUROPE #116

Of the many predictions that are thrown into the fleet ecosystem, “mobility as an alternative to the car” might be the most radical one. It confuses fleet clients and vendors alike, making it hard to strategise and prepare for change.

A couple of questions need to be asked, however: how realistic is this prediction? What is it based on? And finally, is it correct?

natural resources are limited; the entire sharing industry that mobility providers adhere to, is a result of cyclic thinking.

What we already know

Secondly, we know that, at some point in time, autonomous vehicles will be a real thing. Compared to the dedicated car, the possibilities of sharing an autonomous car are endless. It will drive the children to school, drop off mum and dad at work and be used by the grandparents during the daytime. One autonomous vehicle can easily replace 2 to 4 dedicated cars within the

Firstly, we know that linear economies are under pressure. Linear economies follow a “produce-use-dispose” process and are gradually being replaced by cyclic business models, where the reutilisation of assets and sharing of services plays an important role. The very origin of cyclic models comes from the understanding that

same family. The true sharing potential of autonomous, however, happens on a much larger scale: imagine hailing not necessarily your car, but just a car. Today’s mobility industry is perhaps merely a transition model towards autonomous. Thirdly, the company car is under pressure. From an external point of view, we see favourable tax regimes disappear and public opinion and the media – often wrongly – blame the company car for pollution and congestion. Internally, young workforce and urban

Are your employees inclined to return their cars? Let’s have a look at the psychology of the car user in the West. To understand the answer to this question, we’re going to travel to the other side of the world: Asia. Unlike consumers in Western countries, most Asian people have not experienced the transition from home computer to laptop to mobile phone: their first connected device was a Samsung, Huawei or iPhone. As a result, on-demand services – getting what you want, where and when you want it – were immediately popular in Asia. This is also true for mobility services: the hailing and sharing industry got traction from day one, supported by the fact that even sharing a ride with someone else is experienced as an upgrade from driving a bicycle or a motorcycle. Consequently, two factors are dramatically different between mobilityenthusiastic Asia and mobilityhesitating West: in the West, mobility is considered as a downgrade compared to the (company) car and the Western consumer has not yet fully embraced on-demand services.

How can we bring the mobilityexperience closer to the car-experience? In the current state, and even if we spend too much time in traffic jams and have trouble finding a parking spot, nothing beats the experience of having unlimited access to a car; it’s a tough challenge for mobility providers to even come close to its efficiency. Aggregators have understood that joining various solutions, preferably in one super-app, will bring the mobility experience closer to that of a personal car.

Companies such as MaaS Global work very hard to build this experience. They have demonstrated a true potential for success, as long as their solution is aligned with urban policies and good public transport is readily available. Therefore, aggregators bring the mobility experience closer to the car experience. However: • First, the backbone of aggregated mobility is public transport. For MaaS and aggregators to be successful, it needs public transit that can pick up users at a maximum of 15 minutes from the starting point of any journey and drop off the users at a maximum of 15 minutes from the destination. Unfortunately, many European countries have neglected public transport for years, closing railway stations, moving bus stations and reducing the frequency of trains, trams and buses. • Next, integrating a local mobility solution or public transport into one super-app, which is the core business of aggregators, also means that functionalities and tech need to be integrated, commercial agreements need to be made and payment and data privacy issues need to be solved. Aggregators spend a lot of time going through this process with each vendor in each location, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. • Finally, and purely for corporate clients, MaaS, even when provided by aggregators, is an operational nightmare. If your employee takes an Uber ride in the morning to go to work, a similar Uber ride to visit a customer and come back to the office and an Uber ride in the evening to go out for a drink with friends, you’re dealing with 4 transactions and 3 different tax buckets (commuting/business travel/private usage). Multiply by the number of employees and the number of working days: compared to a company

car and the consolidated invoices from your leasing and fuel providers, mobility is a challenge to manage.

Mobility as a Benefit After this gloomy and sceptical picture, it’s time to shed a positive light on MaaS: Mobility excels as a Benefit more than as an “alternative to the car”. A good example is the employer who adds mobility solutions to the (perhaps smaller) company car and allows employees to choose the most appropriate means of transportation for each trip. Another example is the employer who gives a mobility budget to non-car eligible employees and incentivises them to not use their cars to come to the office. A final example is the employer who gives the choice between a car and a mobility budget, allowing, but not forcing the employees to travel using mobility solutions. The mobility safe space is within the Total Rewards category; the flexibility of MaaS matches well with strategies where employees have a choice, rather than an obligation. In this context, MaaS thrives and delivers excellent results: more relaxed employees, more efficient commuting and, why not, less square meters of car parks to lease and lease contracts with lower mileage.

Today’s mobility industry is merely a transition model towards autonomous. FLEET EUROPE #116

employees no longer consider the company car as a benefit. This trend reduces both the absolute and relative value of the car as a perk.

MaaS

GET ALL ABOARD WITH YOUR MAAS STRATEGY Frank Jacobs

Without user buy-in, your corporate MaaS solution is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. So how does your company build a MaaS strategy that motivates your employees to get the most out of all the mobility options that it provides?

Ask three experts, get three very different answers. But different, as in complementary. Combined with a seven-step programme that will get you from Here to Near-Perfect (see box), their insights will help you develop and roll out a corporate MaaS strategy that maximises uptake – which in turn enhances positive results in terms of cost, emissions and efficiency.

think beyond the company car. For a number of years already, we at Nokia have been evaluating the mobility market, testing various services and suppliers.”

Jarno Pajunen, Nokia: “Employees in the early stages of their career are ideally placed to test MaaS.”

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Learn by doing “You learn by doing,” says Jarno Pajunen, Global Category Manager at Nokia and 2019 European Smart Mobility Manager of the Year. “It’s clear that society as a whole is moving to new mobility options – Uber, e-scooters, DriveNow, to name a few. As corporates, we must also evolve, and

“Using Nokia Digital’s Open Ecosystem platform, we publish challenges and find innovative solutions. Some fail, but that’s okay: it also allows us to learn. Additionally, our own R&D division, Bell Labs, has developed a mobility platform which we’re piloting in France under the name MoveInSaclay. We’ve introduced bike leasing in Antwerp, and soon also in other cities.” “For these mobility pilots, we work with the Nokia Young Professionals Network. These employees in the early stages of their career are ideally placed to test the services and comment on them, plus more generally, to share their view on the future mobility offering they would like to have as future benefit users.”

Just add one sentence “How to develop an attractive MaaS strategy for your employees? Simple: add one sentence to your car policy,” says Sampo Hietanen, CEO of MaaS Global. That one sentence makes a world of difference: “Simply add that if the employee finds a mobility provider, they are entitled to spend an amount on mobility equivalent to the budget of their company car.” “By that one sentence, your car policy will have an in-built mechanism to adopt mobility innovation – as soon as it reaches a credible, critical mass. It’s certainly a better way than the

Nudge them gently

Lukas Neckermann, Neckermann Strategic Advisors: “Lots of improvements in mobility can be achieved with so-called ‘gentle nudges’.”

“The first and most obvious step is to get to know the travel patterns of your staff. To find out who uses which vehicles for what purpose, and at which times,” suggests Lukas Neckermann, mobility expert and managing director of Neckermann Strategic Advisors. “Find the answers to questions like: Do they drive alone? Do they live close to other staff? Etcetera. Here, data is your friend - such as that data gathered from telematics and otherwise connected vehicles, as well as travel reports.” Mr Neckermann provides a concrete example: “One fleet and travel manager found out that every Monday, up to

60 of his company’s employees drove to the same airport separately – very expensive in terms of single-occupancy vehicles, not to mention airport parking fees. To improve the situation, this fleet and travel manager organised a shuttle service for all employees involved. This ended up saving the company lots of money, as well as improving safety.” “Lots of improvements in mobility can be achieved with so-called ‘gentle nudges’. Place the parking for bicycles and EVs next to the entrance. Remove parking spots for people who live less than 5km from work. Charge for parking. Organise carsharing and carpooling instead.”

4 Test and validate

And which ones best fit your need? The best way to find that out is to test them. Seek out motivated drivers to set up pilots. This will help you validate what works (and why, and to which degree).

STEPS TO CORPORATE MAAS EFFICIENCY

A lot depends on the proactiveness of the fleet manager: “Corporate MaaS solutions work in places where the fleet managers ensure that mobility trials are integrated so employees benefit from them; where various mobility solutions are available; and where mobility policies have been shifted towards using live data to improve performance. When’s the best time to start all this? Do it now. MaaS is a chicken and egg thing. It won’t happen until it happens.”

5 Implement at an appropriate level

Understand your current status

The MaaS landscape is still very fragmented. Mobility providers typically operate locally – often in specific cities rather than entire countries. That means pilots (and eventual mature MaaS programmes) may have a very limited geographic scope.

Take stock of the mobility needs that exist within your company. This is dependent on your company’s location, your employees’ commutes, and their business mobility needs.

2 Identify stakeholders

6 Follow up and develop

7 Don’t wait for perfect

HR, Finance, Procurement, Real Estate, Sustainability,… the list of corporate departments with an interest in corporate mobility seems to get longer every year. It’s important to identify who they are in your case, and how MaaS can benefit their specific strategy – in other words: find out “what’s in it for them”.

MaaS is an industry in constant flux and perpetual development. Today’s limits may have moved by tomorrow. Keep adapting your MaaS strategy to what’s on offer – because it will evolve all the time.

Go to the market

Universal MaaS – all solutions available everywhere – is so far away that it may never happen. But don’t let ‘best’ be the enemy of ‘better’. Accept that the perfect MaaS solution may never arrive. Work with the improvement that the MaaS solutions that do exist can offer you.

Depending on where you are, the mobility solutions on offer may range from fairly narrow to relatively broad. Within those restrictions, find the suppliers whose mobility offers best fit your need. 11

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Sampo Hietanen, MaaS Global: “Now is the best time to start with MaaS. It’s a chicken and egg thing: it won’t happen until it happens.”

traditional RFP process, which ends up slowing down the general movement towards mobility as a service.”

MaaS

TOP 10 CONDITIONS OF A GOOD MAAS PROPOSAL Yves Helven

Give mobility start-ups the opportunity to learn from you.

If you’re engaged in a mobility project, you’ve probably met with a variety of vendors. Instinctively, you’ll be more attracted to some solutions than others – and you will probably make the right choice. Nevertheless, it’s useful to list up some of the criteria that make a good MaaS provider.

1 TSPs

The experience of the end user and the compatibility with the client’s needs are key. Your ideal MaaS provider is able to connect with any Transport Service Provider (bikes, scooters, ridehailing, public transport…), according to your requirements.

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User-friendly

Your vendor provides an experience and platforms that are userfriendly and intuitive. Users have FAQs, manuals, bots or a helpdesk to ask questions and to have technical issues solved. The applications look nice, can be branded and include elements of gamification.

3 Scalability

Your provider can serve you in all the locations where you need a solution. The vendor has a platform

that allows you to monitor mobility consumption and user behaviour centrally, rather than scattered across different systems.

4 Corporate vs. Consumer

Your vendor understands corporate requirements and can talk the corporate language. They have adapted consumer products to fit enterprise needs and are able to handle tenders, stakeholder management, business cases and presentations as you would expect from a B2B vendor.

5 Budget & Policy Flexibility

You have defined various mobility policies or various budgets for different employee levels. Your vendor can translate all these different profiles in its account/profile feature and make sure your budgets and policies are managed diligently.

6 Tech

The ideal vendor uses mature technology and has a solid team of developers, preferably in-house, to maintain the tech and add features. The tech is well documented, well protected and uses established components rather than obscure ones. Overall, your IT colleagues feel comfortable when they look at the tech architecture.

7 Data Protection

Your provider is GDPR-proof, at least, and has an ISO/IEC certification of the 27000 family. In addition, the vendor can comply with your company-specific requirements or can offer valid alternatives.

8 Payment

Depending on the type of mobility transaction, a payment will need to be processed either by corporate or private credit card, pre-payment or post-payment. Your vendor can deal with your preferred payment method or can offer valid alternatives.

9 Back office

Your vendor provides the technology to absorb and filter the 1,000s of mobility transactions that your employees will be generating. Each transaction lands in your ERP with the correct tags (cost centre, GL code, type of transaction, type of budget…) and is linked to the correct tax bucket.

10 Solid provider

Finally, your vendor is stable, has survived the early phases of a start-up company and has enough funding to be able to deliver services for many years.

Few mature companies There are, at this point, no vendors that comply with all these criteria. The mobility ecosystem is one of few mature companies and many startups. Especially the young companies might have some trouble going through a corporate vendor selection process. Give them the opportunity to learn from you. If you’ve made the right choice, you’ll be onboarding a vendor that will be grateful to you and that will do its utmost best to make it work.

MaaS

FRAGMENTATION TO UNIFICATION Alison Pittaway

The emergence of MaaS won’t change the need for fleet management. Core fleet management will remain highly important.

What today’s MaaS platforms have in common is the ability to amalgamate different elements of mobility, use bespoke algorithms to offer options based on a user destination enquiry or mode of transport and, in some cases, book tickets, process payments and manage transactions. From a user perspective, it takes the frustration out of having to download and onboard a heap of different transport apps.

Providers of MaaS platforms Providers of these platforms include Ghent-based Optimile. Their solution is a white-labelled MaaS platform for managing mobility hardware and services. It maps out the best route for users, according to destination and favoured transport mode, delivers a route planner and host of transport options. It can also be used to manage charging stations. UK-based Mobilleo provides a platform for businesses and an app for consumers. The app enables users to manage travel bookings, including train, flights, hotel and airport lounges, pay and store travel documents. The company is a spin off from Fleetondemand, a fleet technology player. Barcelona-based Iomob offers what it calls an open, global platform for integrated travel. Combining open source and blockchain technology, the start-up uses a decentralised approach so customers (including transport

operators, authorities and startups) can easily announce services to customers. An open network enables any mobility provider to tap into a customer demand pool. The platform accepts payments by cash, credit card and cryptocurrency.

What’s important for fleet managers For fleet managers, the key point is that what fleets are used for hasn’t changed but the way transport is consumed is changing. Currently, too many fleet managers are looking at those areas of consumption in silos. This is the experience of Gary Jefferies, sales and marketing director at fleet, leasing and mobility management platform provider Bynx: “Taking a siloed approach means you miss out on efficiencies, which may be okay for today when the majority of what you support is traditional company car, commercial vehicle, perk fleet and so on, but it shouldn’t be a permanent state.” Jefferies also highlights the importance of not compromising on core fleet management, such as fleet acquisition, disposal, in-life costs, fuel, fines and so on.

The importance of core fleet management “These are all things that won’t change,” he says, “even as we dive deeper into mobility. Traditional fleet management platforms can satisfy those but fleet choice is changing due to social and environmental requirements.

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An abundance of start-ups across Europe is offering a profusion of MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service) platforms – but they’re all very different. What commonly happens in the early days of any new initiative is that the technology required to manage it evolves in a piecemeal fashion. Things are bolted on to existing platforms or solutions develop in silos. The difference these days is that most offerings are a combination of cloud and user apps, which makes it easy for companies and individuals to be up and running super quick.

MaaS

Actually, whatever those assets look like, they’re still going to require core fleet management.” Mobility is fragmenting vehicle and transport consumption, which means expanding the traditional model of one driver, one vehicle to one vehicle, many drivers and one employee, many vehicles or modes of transport. This adds complexity alongside drawing in many more touchpoints, such as local and national government agencies, transport providers, local and licencing authorities – all of which need to be connected into the core fleet management platform, which then becomes a mobility platform.

THE ROLE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) IN MAAS As fleet sizes continue to shrink in an attempt to save costs and instil better utilisation, AI will become more important in terms of decision-making and managing events. Today’s fleets are often wellstructured and budgeted for. But in the future, when vehicles are being used for shorter periods by multiple drivers or customers, decisionmaking time will be shortened. AI, coupled with machine learning and rules management, could assist in automating certain

events, transactions and tasks, especially those that are finite and re-occurring. This will make them more timely, plus allow time for exception management. Speaking about AI, Gary Jefferies commented: “If you’ve got a fleet of a given size, with a predictable transaction volume, then you move into mobility-as-a-service, you’ve got an increase in transactions based on the same volume of fleet. Decisions need to be faster and this is where AI will come in.”

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“IT’S TIME FOR THE FUTURE”

FLEET EUROPE #116

Moments of crisis are windows of opportunity. Sixt is ready for what comes next: the integrated mobility provider will roll out an ensemble of flat rates and flexible products, accessible via a single app and available all over the world. If you think of Sixt as a vehicle rental company focused on Germany and Europe, you’re living in the past. Integrated mobility is the name of its game, both for the private and corporate markets, and the world is its oyster. What’s more: Sixt is about to take that to the next level, says Vinzenz Pflanz, the company’s President of Corporate Sales.

More flexible “It’s time for the future of mobility. That’s why we’re radically redesigning our offer,” says Mr Pflanz. “Take for instance Sixt mobiflex, a pay-as-you-use alternative to the company car: more flexible, and cheaper.” Or Sixt unlimited: a flat-rate rental product giving frequent travellers access to premium vehicles when and where they need them.

Appetising alternatives With its emphasis on the subscription model, Sixt’s new approach is aimed at providing appetising alternatives to ‘classic’ leasing formulas. And that might just be what corporate fleets are looking for, post Covid-19: “Our economies will be reshaped. Companies will want to variabilise their fixed costs.”

Vinzenz Pflanz, President of Corporate Sales at Sixt

More info

www.sixt.com

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MaaS

JARNO PAJUNEN, Nokia:

“WE’RE LOOKING AT MaaS AND BaaS” Benjamin Uyttebroeck

@uytteb

Jarno Pajunen won the 2019 European Smart Mobility Manager of the Year award and the Fleet & Mobility Manager of the Year award.

sponsored by

Nokia is connecting people – not only through telecommunications. Its mobility policy is another way they do that. Fleet Europe spoke with Jarno Pajunen, Global Category Manager Travel & Fleet, Nokia and winner of not one but two Fleet Europe Awards. Jarno Pajunen has overhauled Nokia’s fleet policy and set the stage for a policy focusing more on mobility. Reason enough for the 2019 Fleet Europe Awards jury to award him both the European Smart Mobility Manager of the Year award and the European Fleet & Mobility Manager of the Year award. Mr Pajunen manages the Nokia fleet, which has around 12,000 cars worldwide, mostly benefit cars. Traditionally, these were managed in operational leasing but Nokia has been looking at ways to shake up its mobility strategy.

In Finland, for example, Nokia staff is piloting Whim, the MaaS app developed by MaaS Global, another Finnish company. “This is open to all employee profiles,” explained Mr Pajunen. Employees that use the Whim app no longer have their own company car, but they can book a rental car through the app, alongside other options like public transport, bikes, taxis and micromobility solutions. “Although that last category is limited in Finnish winters,” added Mr Pajunen.

Global Category Manager Travel & Fleet Nokia

Sector

Technology

Responsible for 12,000 cars worldwide (+/- 100,000 employees)

Survey Before the launch of MaaS in the company, Nokia conducted a survey to ascertain how employees across the globe commute from their home to the office. It also enquired what mobility options were available to employees, and what options they would use if they were introduced. With the results of this survey in hand, Mr Pajunen saw his colleagues were mostly open to alternative mobility solutions. “It’s still early days for MaaS, though,” he added, “the services are still very local with few options that are available in more than one country or indeed even in more thabn one city. But the market is evolving and Nokia is confident a large part of its mobility needs will be fulfilled by MaaS in the near future.”

Getting from A to B Whether a trip is a business trip or part of the daily commute, that shouldn’t matter, believes Mr Pajunen. “The question is: how do we move? It’s all about moving employees from A to B and that’s why it should all be in the same basket.” This does require close

INVESTMENT FUND Nokia isn’t only a user of new mobility services, it is also investing in it, through their investment fund spinoff NGP Capital. Around 40% of their investments are in the field of mobility. In the past, NGP Capital has invested in Drivy in France, but also in the Lime scooters, in an Indian company called Zoomcar and in Moovit from Israel.

“Taxation doesn’t recognise mobility well enough,” said Mr Pajunen, pointing to another issue complicating the adoption of MaaS. Nevertheless, he is convinced taxation will need to follow this new reality eventually.

“I USE A BIG CAR FOR MY FAMILY AND MY DOGS”

Location by location At this moment, Nokia’s mobility experiments are focused on Europe, particularly on key countries like Finland, Germany, Belgium and France. “We can only try new services where they are available,” commented Mr Pajunen. “There isn’t one global solution. It’s location by location.” “Flexibility is key,” said Mr Pajunen. “In Antwerp, for instance, we are testing a bike leasing programme.”

Global fleet policy In spite of Nokia’s best efforts, most employees still rely on their company cars. The Nokia fleet is made up mostly of benefit cars. Their fleet policy is therefore mostly local, but there is a common, harmonised framework that includes preferred brands, safety topics and maximum emission levels. This could all change if MaaS solutions became more widespread, though.

BaaS “Actually, we’re not only looking at MaaS, we’re also looking at BaaS,” said Mr Pajunen. “If MaaS is Mobility-as-a-Service, then BaaS is Benefit-as-a-Service.” A BaaS package can include mobility options but also other, non-mobility related benefits. “Having all benefits in one platform makes it easier to manage everything,” explained Mr Pajunen. Non-mobility benefits in a BaaS package could be wellness products, gym memberships, insurance premiums and much more.

Working from home If mobility is about getting from A to B, it can also be about staying at A and not going anywhere. As such, teleworking or telecommuting can also fit in a mobility policy. “It’s also about

Jarno Pajunen is originally from Central Finland but he’s been living close to the capital for more than twenty years. The Nokia headquarters are located in Espoo, which is adjacent to Helsinki. Mr Pajunen enjoys ski trips with his wife and two children. Add the two dogs to the picture and you see why he needs a somewhat bigger car. “I’m driving a plug-in hybrid and have been for the past six years,” he said. “I’m looking forward to one day having a fully electric car. That will probably be the next one.”

sustainability,” added Mr Pajunen. “If you’re not moving anywhere, you’re not producing any emissions.” Teleworking is of course not possible for everyone in every position. At this point, it is decided on a local level and there is no global policy on teleworking. Mr Pajunen believes in the advantages: “I do it on average two days a week. Especially if I have to make a lot of phone calls, I prefer to do it in the quiet of my home.”

FLEET EUROPE #116

Jarno Pajunen Role

collaboration between departments like Travel, Fleet, Finance and HR and getting their noses in the same direction. “In the future, it might even include flights,” he added.

MaaS

Your business case will gain credibility if you establish ROI with the help of Finance.

STEPS TO OBTAIN A MOBILITY MANDATE Yves Helven

Obtaining mandate and budget for innovation has become a tough job in a corporate environment. Fleet Europe asked the members of the Smart Mobility Institute for advice: what is the best strategy for a mobility project to be approved by your organisation?

Define the problem you want to solve with mobility

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Mobility projects need to serve a purpose: replacing the car for urban traffic, sustainability, flexible benefits… Understanding and being able to establish how mobility will contribute to your objectives is essential for the story you are about to tell. It also solves a second issue: where does mobility belong in a corporate structure? If the purpose is to create new flexible benefits, mobility belongs to Total Rewards; if mobility will act as an add-on to, or a replacement of the company car, Fleet Management could be the best category.

Get your figures right You will need a budget for implementation. Mobility projects

tend to be complex and involve multiple functions within the organisation: Functional Leadership, Benefits, Comms, HR OPS, Facilities, Tech, Procurement, external consultants… Look at your project from different angles and establish who you’ll be needing support from. Consider also changes to be made to your expense note system or payroll software. Prepare a 2- or 3-year budget. Your implementation budget will sit in year 1, so it’s advisable to project your ROI over a few years. The advice from the SMI members is to involve Finance at a very early stage: establishing the baseline against which mobility will be posted and ROIs calculated, is a complex matter that involves more than the Fleet’s TCO. Operational costs, expense notes, travel cost and

even parking costs will have an impact on the budget. When established with the help of Finance, your business case will gain credibility.

Prepare for the caveats

Simple, practical questions from your stakeholders might catch you off-guard. Prepare, at least, an answer to the following questions: • What should the user experience be like? • What are the vendor requirements? • Will there be more administrative workload? • Which pilot cities do you recommend and why? • How will payments be processed? • How to cope with data privacy requirements? • How to plug in/out new vendors?

Pitch to HR

When vision, budget and question list are ready, the members of the Smart Mobility Institute recommend pitching to HR first. The conversation with HR needs to contain elements that contribute to the company’s strategy and elements that temper the complexity of a mobility project. Appealing HR keywords are: flexibility, satisfaction and ROI. • Flexibility is a central concept in Total Rewards strategies. Demonstrating that mobility is flexible by nature and can solve a multitude of concerns (issues with new generations, urban traffic limitations, digitisation, image, active lifestyle and wellness), will appeal to your HR stakeholders. • Satisfaction: employee efficiency and retention are direct results of employee satisfaction. Any HR professional constantly needs to find a balance between signals coming from the business and signals coming from the workforce. It is rare when both coincide, but it is the case with mobility – hence an essential argument to put forward when pitching to HR. o The number of business kilometres driven by company cars is gradually decreasing due to the digitisation of business models, so there’s an argument to reduce the number of company cars as well.

o Parts of the workforce, especially the younger and urban population, also prefer to get rid of a company car that is difficult to park and of no use for city traffic. The combination of both asks is an excellent gateway to get the conversation going and create buy-in from HR. • ROI: centrally driven initiatives are typically funded by the functions or on country P&L. HR professionals often end up in a position where they’re promoting new initiatives to P&L owners, who are not excited to accept additional costs and will push back. Demonstrating the economic viability of your project and giving HR tools to defend it will accelerate the journey to approval and increase its chances for success.

Sponsorship from leadership

Leadership pitches are short and punchy, but also realistic and balanced. They demonstrate fundamental rather than circumstantial benefits for the company and coincide with existing strategies, rather than creating new ones. A good approach is to highlight how a mobility project can contribute to the company’s objectives – the ones that are put forward externally (sustainability, people, social, perception…), but also the underlaying ones that generate profit (efficiency, cost, retention, tax…).

The leadership pitch works best when told as a coherent and compelling story that takes the C-Levels through elements such as: • Company Image: mobility reflects well on the company’s market perception • Social Contribution: mobility as a tool to fulfil the company’s social duties • Sustainability: mobility versus car and its impact on emissions • Human Factor: mobility to highlight the people-centricity of the company • Mobility as a benefit: health, safety, flexibility… By focusing on “mobility as a contributor”, the aim of the leadership pitch is to receive the green light, buy-in and sponsorship for the project.

Good to go All in all, pitching a mobility project comes down to having these things lined up: • Your vision, to be translated into policy • The workings, from an operational point of view and from an end-user point of view • The budget, ideally leading to a better way of spending the equivalent of the fleet’s TCO • Transition and change, to ensure uptake by the employees This leaves us wishing you a great mobility journey!

Since 2019 we we have been organising the Smart Mobility Institute, a think thank and best practice sharing community of corporate fleet and mobility managers interested in the transformation from Fleet to Mobility. Our next session is on 8 and 9 June in Amsterdam. Register now via https://www.conference-fleeteurope.com

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THINK SMART MOBILITY

MaaS

WHICH MAAS PLAYERS WILL WIN THE AGGREGATION RACE? Frank Jacobs

Aggregation – bringing together various mobility modes in one platform – is the essence of MaaS. And yet ‘total aggregation’ – offering all options available (at one location, let alone globally) – remains elusive. Those are the outlines of the paradox at the heart of MaaS. Can the riddle be solved?

No single MaaS player yet offers ‘total aggregation’: all mobility options available at one location, let alone globally.

Mobility as a Service is an industry in full flux. Its landscape is taking shape – aggregating, if you will – in front of our very eyes. But a few things are already clear, says Piia Karjalainen, Secretary General of the MaaS Alliance, an international Mobility as a Service association with an open, sustainable and inclusive vision for the industry’s future.

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Two models “Aggregation is the core of MaaS. That’s why we define MaaS as a platform including more than one transport mode, and offering all phases of transaction, from planning and booking to payment, and real-time travel information throughout the trip.

With that in mind, we see two models emerging. • Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG): you can use various mobility modes and use all of them for your trip with a single payment. • Subscription: you pay a fixed price to access to various mobility modes over a certain time period, say, per month.” It’s too early to say which of those will ‘win’ the race to dominate the MaaS industry, but “PAYG is more familiar of course; the subscription model may be well-known to end consumers from services such as Netflix, but is not that common in a mobility context yet.”

Integrating various mobility modes – public transport, shared cars, e-scooters, and so on – is not easy. “But not because of technical issues. That is not the problem. Most often, the issue is the commercial integration of the various mobility modes. It can be time-consuming for various players to find a revenue model that fits all stakeholders.”

Car ownership And precisely in the economic equation lies another MaaS paradox: “Mobility as a Service requires a good public transport system. That is the only way to make it sustainable – and profitable. The profitmaking opportunities also depend very much on how

CMaaS is so novel that it has no real competitors yet. “We would love to have competitors. Our approach is entirely new. Healthy competition would help us develop the market faster, by splitting the effort to create it,” Mr Ireson says.

Piia Karjalainen, Secretary General of the MaaS Alliance: “Aggregation is the core of MaaS.” well we are able to unlock the money that today still circulates around privately-owned vehicles, and to channel part of it into the usage of various transport services made easily accessible via an app.” We’re still learning how to do MaaS and the field is evolving rapidly: there are lots of MaaS schemes in development, and new players are constantly popping up. “I think it’s safe to say that MaaS will not be dominated by one single model, let alone single company,” says Ms Karjalainen. One company developing a new approach is CMaaS. “Providers often use the Netflix metaphor for their MaaS offering: subscribe to one ‘super app’ to access their range of services. We take one step back, plugging in various existing platforms into your ecosystem. Not just Netflix, but Disney, HBO and all the others,” says William Ireson, Global Director for Mobility Services at Connector, which has developed the CMaaS approach.

It’s a market that is starting to look a lot different from the old corporate mobility paradigm, by the way. That was driven by ‘needs’, while MaaS is straying into the ‘wants’ area. “Mobility as a Service is increasingly seen as a benefit. So the whole MaaS discussion is moving away from Fleet to HR. We, and other MaaS players, will have to learn to speak the language of lifestyle, health, even entertainment.”

Sustainable solution So, what does the pathway to that future look like? “Globally, corporate mobility is a business worth more than 1.2 trillion dollars. So there’s lots of scope for MaaS to add efficiency and lower cost. In this context, it is understandable why the MaaS market is expected to grow by 25% to 35% a year,” says Ms Karjalainen. “Pending the development of better models to integrate public transportation with other mobility modes, there’s a lot of money to be made – and saved – with MaaS. Plus, MaaS is a sustainable mobility solution, and it can be part of corporate responsibility policies.” So, who will those providers be? “There is great potential among the lease and rental companies, many of whom are transforming themselves from pure fleet managers to mobility providers with a much broader perspective. The corporate mobility market is definitely a very interesting one for MaaS providers and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many new entries in the near future.”

Novel approach

PRESENT AND FUTURE MAAS HIGH-FLYERS MaaS Global

One of the highest-profile players, doing an excellent job in its home market in Helsinki, and working very hard throughout Europe. Owned in part by Toyota and Mitsubishi, which explains their interest in providing MaaS in Asia-Pacific (notably Japan and Australia).

Mobileo

Strong presence in the UK, now also starting to transit to being a player on the European mainland.

Sixt

The Germany-based company has just divested itself of its leasing branch. It could go either of two ways: back to its core business, which is short-term rental; or moving away from car-centred business model into MaaS. Since Sixt has been profiling itself as a mobility and technology company, the second option is likely.

The Dutch railway operator has a mature business model for MaaS, sharing its APIs with other providers. Its peers are less flexible in this regard, and also less successful.

Lease companies

These large players in the fleet industry will use their traditional strengths to expand into new MaaS territory.

OEMs

The same goes for manufacturers. Tesla could be an example: a 2019 software update enabled carsharing. That option is as yet dormant, but could be a ground-breaking innovation when activated. Another interesting company to watch is Toyota, which is spending a lot of money investing in all sorts of mobility innovations – including but certainly not limited to the aforementioned partnership with MaaS Global.

The ‘super app’ method – trying to get everyone on the same page, literally – is slow and costly. CMaaS, Mr Ireson says, has found a novel approach, that is both faster and more comprehensive. “Plus, from a corporate point of view, it allows fleets to build their

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MaaS offering around their policy, and not the other way around. That bottom-up approach allows for a lot more flexibility.”

SHARED MOBILITY

CARSHARING WILL GO ON, BUT IT WILL BE DIFFERENT Benjamin Uyttebroeck

@uytteb

Shared transport options are the newest addition to the mobility landscape. There are no hard and fast rules to guarantee success and new companies are appearing and disappearing every day. Making shared mobility work is no easy feat, said Yves Helven, Global Fleet expert. “If you sell a product like laptops, you manufacture the laptops and then try to sell them. So you only have to look for one kind of customer. If you’re in the business of shared cars, you need to find the vehicles and you need to find customers. That’s twice the prospection.”

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For shared platforms that are not linked to carmakers, this proves to be particularly challenging. “Often, they don’t get the best and most popular cars,” added Mr Helven. “A customer who chooses to share a car is prepared to give up part of their comfort – owning their own vehicle. But they’re not prepared to take four steps back in terms of vehicle comfort.” Fleet Europe expert and former CEO of Arval Philippe Bismut commented: “I don’t know of any public carsharing company which is making money and which is doing well. It’s a very complicated business to manage: you need the logistics, the technology, the customer service, the operation – even more if it’s free-floating. A lot of players have had to pull the plug because it was too complicated.”

DriveNow and Car2go have recently completed the integration of their fleets. Mr Helven added: “Shared services that are part of carmaker groups like Mercedes or BMW can make their business case work in cities like Berlin because the volume is large enough and Berlin is still a rather compact city. There’s also a degree of name recognition through the link with BMW and Mercedes in the case of Share Now.”

Lyft. What riders pay for an Uber to get them from A to B often compares favourably to what shared cars cost, particularly when factoring in that they don’t need to park the car and they’re not responsible in case of an accident.

In less dense and in smaller cities, offering a sufficient number of cars for a relatively small user base often turns out to be the recipe for an unsustainable business.

Making money offering shared cars is difficult but that is not to say there is no future in carsharing. Share Now has recently completed the integration of the former DriveNow and car2go fleets, offering shared vehicles in 16 European cities where the company believes the market can sustain them.

Shared rides vs hailed rides

Peer-to-peer carsharing

Carsharing also has to compete with ridehailing companies like Uber and

Peer-to-peer carsharing could also prove to be successful in the future.

Opening up even a portion of the fleet to corporate carsharing can make a big difference.

The Citroën Ami could be the ideal vehicle for an urban carsharing scheme.

MICRO-CARSHARING

All three have one thing in common: they are electric microcars. The Twizy entered production in 2012 and starts to get somewhat long in the tooth. The other two have yet to enter our roads but they will most likely have looked in great detail at the French trendsetter to improve its shortcomings. No carsharing operator has so far included them in their fleet, but these

vehicles could be the perfect shared cars in urban areas. Their limited range and their low top speed aren’t an issue in cities – few urban trips go further than the range and city driving isn’t done at high speeds anyway. And their modest list price should make the investment easier to digest for the carsharing provider. Enter Free2Move Share, a carsharing programme specifically designed for the Citroën Ami. Once operational, a monthly subscription fee of €9.90 will let you drive around in one at a very competitive 26 cents per minute.

Corporate carsharing

It will be especially interesting to look out for what Tesla will be doing in this marketplace. Early last year, Tesla issued an over-the-air update to prepare all Teslas for carsharing. The feature hasn’t been activated yet but once it is, all Teslas could easily be offered as peer-to-peer shared cars. “A peer-to-peer carsharing business is less expensive in terms of capital,” said Fleet Europe expert and former deputy CEO of ALD Pascal Serres. “The cars belong to others so you only need to pay back-office staff. This is what companies like Drivy are doing. I don’t think they are making any profit either, but their losses are much lower because they don’t need to finance their cars.”

A special kind of peer-to-peer carsharing is corporate carsharing. Many drivers only use their company car to commute to and from work, leaving it parked for most of the day. The cost this represents to companies is enormous. Opening up even a portion of this fleet to other colleagues can make a big difference. The traditional obstacle to introduce carsharing within companies – managing who’s driving which car at what time – has disappeared with the advent of technology. Indeed, managing shared cars is now a breeze. Various large companies have implemented carsharing to great success. Qteal, an embedded software company from Antwerp, even went one step further, making its full fleet a shared fleet. Read all about it in Fleet Europe 114.

Corona Clearly, carsharing is here to stay. Don’t remove it from your MaaS menu yet, but be prepared to change suppliers.

“There will be a high turnover in the sector,” concluded Mr Bismut. As the whole world has ground to a halt in an attempt to stop the coronavirus, demand for short-term rental cars and for shared cars has almost completely disappeared. A spokesperson for Dutch automotive association Bovag said companies reported a 70% drop in turnover before the country had even gone into lockdown. Long-term effects could be limited if we can go back to normal soon but as the weeks become months, that may be a different story.

“I don’t know of any public carsharing company which is making money” Philippe Bismut

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Renault failed to cut the mustard with the Twizy but that didn’t stop Seat from unveiling its Minimo microcar in February 2019. One year later, Citroën presented the Ami.

SHARED MOBILITY

SHARED MOBILITY OPTIONS FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW Benjamin Uyttebroeck

@uytteb

One of the flying shuttle concepts of Uber.

Shared mobility encompases traditional means of transport like bikes and cars, but also more innovative ones like self-driving shuttles and passenger drones. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an overview of some of the more interesting options on the market today and some that will become available soon.

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Shared mobility is a diverse ecosystem with a wide range of providers that often focus on particular segments or regions. It covers car mobility but also bikes, scooters or more innovative means of transport. Often, they are powered by electric drivetrains. Another thing most have in common: they strongly rely on technology and IT systems, which explains why most of these services were unheard of not that long ago. The shared mobility ecosystem is disrupting more traditional mobility models and it will go through its own disruption in the near future, as self-driving technology edges towards maturity, paving the way for autonomous services that are not yet feasible but will be soon. On these pages, we list 3 shared mobility services that are already available today and 2 that will become a reality in the near future.

TODAY 1

Turo: Peer-to-peer carsharing

Peer-to-peer carsharing services do not need to operate and pay for their own fleets â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an important advantage over companies that do put their own cars on the streets. Turo is an interesting case in point. Originally founded in the Boston area, the service has since expanded to most big cities in the US and Canada and has recently expanded into the UK and Germany.

Basically, Turo allows anyone to add their vehicle onto the Turo platform, where other users can then rent it. Consequently, Turo does not own the fleet and neither does the company need to pay for it. The choice of cars that is available on the Turo platform depends on what users offer. At the time of writing, users in Berlin could pick vehicles like a Volkswagen Polo, a Tesla Model 3, a Volvo XC90 and much more.

Share Now: free-floating carsharing in 16 cities

Share Now is the carsharing division of Your Now, a joint venture set up by Daimler and BMW when they merged their mobility services. Today, Share Now has completed the merging process of the former DriveNow (BMW) and car2go (Daimler). At the end of last year, the company withdrew from North America and a number of cities in Europe but it still offers its services in 16 cities in eight countries across Europe where users have access to a free-floating fleet of 14,000 vehicles. Share Now has started offering longterm rentals of up to 14 days in most markets and plans to roll this out further in the future.

Business users can choose to have their trips invoiced as classic travel expenses or they can opt for monthly collective invoices to the company.

reveal £17,000 in subsidies have been spent for each bike since 2010. In large part, this has been spent on infrastructure and docking stations.

In several cities, Share Now set up a collaboration with public transport providers.

Since the publicly-funded Boris Bikes were launched, two competitors from the private sector have emerged that do not rely on subsidies. Mobike and Ofo make use of technology that wasn’t available in 2010, meaning they do not require docking stations.

London: where Boris Bikes and private bikes coexist

Back when Boris Johnson was mayor of London and the UK was still happily married to the European Union, notwithstanding the occasional bickering, the first bikesharing scheme was introduced in London. Officially called Santander Cycles but colloquially known as Boris Bikes, they were a big hit from the start. They are not uncontroversial, though, as figures released to Verdict under the Freedom of Information Act

However, a spokesperson for Mobike told Verdict that government funding has enabled London to embrace bike share, showing that there is a great demand for cycling. Moreover, projected population growth indicates there should be room for at least three players on the London bikeshare market.

TOMORROW “Any moment now!” We’ve been announcing self-driving cars and shuttles for some time, but GM seems to be getting close with the Cruise Origin. Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of General Motors, unveiled the Origin at the start of 2020. The Origin is a self-driving shuttle developed in cooperation with Honda. Importantly, CEO Dan Ammann emphasised it is not a prototype – no, it’s a fully-fledged production model. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it’s ready to hit the roads. Cruise is still working to get their Origin approved for use on public roads, which is challenging as it does not comply with all construction, performance and durability requirements for motor vehicles.

Cruise is confident regulations will be amended in the near future, which could set off a mobility revolution. An affordable one at that. Mr Amman told Tech Crunch making the Origin inexpensive was a prime concern. “Because if we’re really serious about improving life, and our cities, we need huge numbers of people to use the Cruise Origin. And that won’t happen unless we deliver on a very simple proposition, a better experience at a lower price than what you pay to get around today.”

Uber Air: Air taxi

Uber already operates an air taxi that can take you from Manhatten to JFP airport, but that’s hardly an innovative means of transport. But eVTOL is – short for electric vertical take-off and landing or what the layman would call drones.

For the time being, this limits the Cruise Origin to use on private campuses.

Uber is only one of many companies that hope to launch a passenger drone service in the near future, but their target is ambitious. The ridehailing giant hopes to start demonstrator flights for Uber Air already this year and commercial operations should follow in 2023. Uber Air has partnered with companies like Joby Aviation, Boeing, Embraer and Hyundai to produce electric aircraft. The craft should have room for four passengers with an additional pilot seat – indeed, at least the first generation will not be autonomous yet. The first cities where Uber Air hopes to take passengers to the skies are Dallas, Los Angeles and Melbourne. Nevertheless, technical and legal hurdles to get an eVTOL up in the air are quite daunting, so delays aren’t unlikely.

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Cruise Origin: Self-driving shuttles

SHARED MOBILITY

RECONCILING SHARED MOBILITY WITH PUBLIC TRANSPORT Jonathan Manning

Saviour or scourge? Do new urban mobility solutions provide an existential threat to traditional public transport, or are they the lifeline that brings mass transit into the 21st century? Will ridehailing and carsharing remove people from public transport or provide a last mile solution for travellers to reach bus stops and train stations? Will these mobility solutions help to combat congestion and pollution, or will they increase car travel at the expense of buses, trams and trains? Will bikeshare and e-scooter schemes lure people out of their cars, or simply make life more difficult for pedestrians by creating a silent menace and blocking pavements with discarded dockless bikes and scooters?

Cannibalise public transport

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These are the questions facing city authorities as the populations of urban areas rise and demands on existing transport infrastructure grow. With many older cities struggling to expand the capacity of their old public transport networks, authorities are looking for partners and solutions to ease overcrowding on buses and trains, especially at peak times, while simultaneously cutting traffic congestion and pollution. The potential exists for new mobility services and public transport to support each other, but the danger is that new mobility solutions cannibalise public transport. Pitched against the inflexibility of bus and trains, with

For the benefit of mobility let’s hope taxis and ridehailing companies will support and not cannibalise public transport. their rigid timetables, clunky ticketing and fixed stops, on-demand transport treats travellers like customers, picking them up and delivering them where they want, when they want, paid for through the convenience of an app. In a new report, Arthur D Little says the arrival of ridehailing companies has ‘triggered a seismic shift’ towards

shared individual transportation, putting them on a collision course with the public mobility ecosystem. However, the same report also suggested that these new mobility providers “have the potential to provide an efficient and convenient complementary service to existing mobility solutions in urban areas.”

Chris Snyder, CEO of ViaVan, believes the next few years will see cities looking to provide their citizens with transport that “provides the same ease and convenience as private car ownership, and yet still achieves the same environmental and congestion-reducing benefits of mass transport.” Following a similar theme, Michael Hurwitz, Director of Transport Innovation, Transport for London, has outlined a series of guidelines for how the UK capital views the future collaboration between new mobility suppliers and the existing public transport system.

It’s not sustainable “I like it when a new mobility business model complements the public transport model, when it allows the less able to remain socially and economically active, when something is available to everybody, and when it encourages an active lifestyle and is environmentally friendly,” he said. “But I like it less when you take 60 people out of a double-decker bus and smear them around 60 pods or cars, or if you devise an app only accessible to tech-savvy, wealthy hipsters.”

Demand-responsive public transport Through a combination of regulation and partnership, ridehailing platforms can offer “services that complement, or even partly replace, public transport. These joint services offer “demand responsive public transport” (DRPT) on special routes or at certain times of day.”

Mr Hurwitz urged city authorities to adopt a flexible approach to innovation, allowing space for business models to develop, rather than setting frameworks in stone. He also expressed caution that many of the new mobility solutions may not survive, at least in their current format. “What we see now is not sustainable, it’s not what you are going to see in the future,” he said. “No one is making money from the ridesharing and the e-scooter world.”

Integrate into public transport Even the biggest players are haemorrhaging money. Last year Uber took $65 billion in bookings, but reported losses of $8.5 billion. Fellow ridehailer Lyft grew its revenues by 68% in 2019, yet still posted a net loss of $2.6 billion. And in the world of e-scooter sharing, Boston Consulting Group has calculated that the typical e-scooter only survives for three months, but takes four months to deliver a return on its investment. A pilot project in Seattle, USA provides evidence that Uber and Lyft have accepted that they need to work with public transport providers. Their ‘Rideshare to Transit’ programme provides travellers with a discount on ridesharing journeys, but only if they stop at stations and bus stops. There are also powerful signs that city authorities see the advantages of working with mobility suppliers. Yann Hervouet, CEO Instant System, which creates white label MaaS platforms for cities including Paris and Brussels, said: “Half the itineraries we plan in Paris are more efficient with intermodal schemes.” This means journey times would be quicker if travellers used a combination of public transport and new mobility solutions. “For example, e-scooters and public transport is about 30% faster,” said Mr Hervouet. All of this points to an ideal world where policymakers and mobility suppliers collaborate to integrate new modes of transport into the existing public transport infrastructure, adopting the technological and customer-focused advantages of start-ups with the benefits of public transport in terms of speedy mass transit. It is a future that will require public authorities to be in the driving seat, however, using regulation to ensure safety, environmental and congestion targets are achieved.

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On-demand minibus company ViaVan, for example, is working with public transport authorities in cities such as Oslo, Helsinki, Berlin, Liverpool and London to help re-engineer public transit from its historic system of rigid routes and schedules to a dynamic, on-demand network.

NEW ENERGIES

TOP 10

NEW FLEET CARS FROM ‘GENEVA’ @DieterQuartier

The 2020 Geneva Motor Show was cancelled but most OEMs presented their new models anyway, through a live video stream. As is customary, Fleet Europe selected for you the top 10 innovative models that you should consider adding to your vehicle list.

1 Audi A3 Sportback

Aesthetically, the fourth-generation A3 won’t shock anybody, but it’s packed with advanced driver assistance and connectivity technologies enabling it to communicate with infrastructure and increase the level of autonomous driving. Power comes from a choice of petrol and diesel engines, with CNG and plug-in hybrid powertrains following later.

2 BMW 330e touring

Finally, the Bavarian premium carmaker fits the 330e’s plug-in hybrid powertrain in the estate car model. It has also developed PHEV-specific connected services, enabling you to check charging station availability on board and get a forecast of the occupancy status. In the future, you can even briefly reserve a station.

3 Seat Leon

The new Seat Leon is available as a petrol, diesel, plug-in hybrid, mild hybrid or CNG car. Seat calls it the brand’s first fully connected car and it features a digital instrument cluster, an advanced voice recognition system with natural commands and Apple CarPlay or Android Auto connectivity. As before, you can choose between a 5-door hatchback and an estate model.

4 Mercedes E-Class FLEET EUROPE #115

The looks of this facelifted icon are now more in line with the rest of the Mercedes range. Drivetrains have been overhauled: it now offers 7 plug-in hybrids (with either petrol or diesel), a mild hybrid variant and various diesel and petrol engines. The E-Class has the latest MBUX infotainment system and new assisted driving features.

5 Renault Mégane E-Tech

What makes this fleet steady-seller interesting is not so much its facelift, but the fact that it now comes with a plug-in hybrid powertrain. It features two electric motors and an innovative multimode gearbox, which operates through a clutchless transmission. The 9.8kWh battery gives a range of 50km under mixed WLTP conditions.

6 Fiat 500e

The third-generation Cinquecento is quite revolutionary: it is only available as a fully electric vehicle, promising a range of around 320km. In all, this new model is 6cm wider and it has 2cm more between the wheels. Its 42kWhbattery outperforms both the Honda e and the electric Mini and can be charged from 10 to 80% in 35 minutes.

7 Hyundai i20

It’s difficult for a brand like Hyundai to compete with home-players Peugeot 208, VW Polo, Opel Corsa and Renault Clio, but this new i20 brings a lot to the table to convince the most discerning customers: the best safety package in its segment, advanced connectivity and even 48V mild hybrid powertrains.

8 DS9

This all-new large saloon designed for the global market but particularly for China, where it is produced, gets the plug-in hybrid powertrain from the DS7 Crossback E-Tense with two more to follow soon. If you think there is a link with the Peugeot 508: there is. The DS9 uses the same platform, but it is much more comfort oriented.

9 Skoda Octavia RS iV

Sporty performance, TCO and eco credentials can go hand in hand, with this peppy plug-in hybrid from the Czech Republic. Skoda mates a 110kW turbo-charged 1.4 petrol engine to a 85kW electric motor that is fed by a 13kWh battery, which should be enough for 60 electric WLTP kilometres.

10 Cupra Formentor

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Seat’s performance sister brand introduces its very own C-segment crossover. It comes with the same electrified turbo-charged 1.4 petrol as its Czech cousin, which enables it to drive 50km on e-power – a bit less than the Octavia due to added aerodynamic drag and weight. It has few competitors besides perhaps the BMW X2 xDrive25e.

NEW ENERGIES

WILL COMPANY CAR DRIVERS JUMP FROM DIESEL TO EVS WITHOUT TRYING PHEVS? Jonathan Manning

As tax systems change and technology improves, fleets are exploring the opportunity to transition directly from internal combustion engines to pure battery power. Plug-in hybrid (PHEV) cars which once seemed a logical stepping stone from diesel to electric now face twin threats. On the one hand, electric cars offer lower tax bills for company car drivers, lower CO2 emissions for corporate carbon footprints and only a small price premium over PHEVs. On the other hand, petrol and diesel models are significantly cheaper and avoid the hassle of recharging batteries. Caught between the two, PHEVs risk looking expensive for their limited zero emission range of about 50km.

Company car tax In the Netherlands, pure electric cars and PHEVs originally enjoyed the same company car tax advantages, but when the Dutch government changed the rules so that the tax savings applied only to battery electric cars, sales of PHEVs declined sharply, said Octavian Chelu, principal consultant fleet & leasing at Frost & Sullivan. The market’s tax sensitivity and the desire of governments everywhere to promote zero emission vehicles mean PHEVs will not provide a stepping stone to pure electric, added Chelu.

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“The evolution of PHEVs will depend on how much EVs will drop in price. PHEVs were successful at the beginning of the electric vehicle lifecycle because EVs only had a very limited range. But now the focus of manufacturers is definitely on EVs,” said Chelu. In the UK, the government has not only removed grants to support the purchase of PHEVs, but has also introduced new company car tax rules that widen the tax gap between electric, PHEV, hybrid and petrol and diesel

cars. There are now valuable incentives for drivers who choose the lowest emission cars. The biggest winners are drivers who select a pure electric company car. They will pay no tax on the car in the 2020-21 fiscal year (April to April). “The large change in UK company car tax rates for EVs from 16% in 2019 to 0% in 2020 and the policy clarity for the next five years are strong incentives for fleet managers to consider EVs,” said Dr. Jose Serras-Pereira, consulting director, Frost & Sullivan. “Together with increases in model specific CO2 emissions due to WLTP, it means that there has never been greater incentives for fleets to go electric.” But PHEVs still have a role to play depending on different use cases, said Serras-Pereira. “The BIK deltas between PHEV and a petrol or diesel vehicle are still high enough to provide a real financial incentive,” he said.

Rising EV demand Andrew Mee, head of forecast UK, cap hpi, said the exceptionally low benefit in kind tax for electric cars will prompt a surge in uptake among company car drivers. “From a fleet perspective I do not think PHEVs and hybrids will be as attractive as pure EVs. They have lost ground on tax, their cost of refueling is higher, and they are not as good for reducing CO2,” said Mee. He added that a significant improvement in residual value performance among cheaper electric cars will further boost their popularity as lease rates fall.

Tesla surges ahead Tesla has featured among the top 10 manufacturers of Ogilvie Fleet, one of the UK’s leading leasing companies, for the last six months, thanks to drivers seeking the lowest possible tax bills, said Nick Hardy, Ogilvie’s sales and marketing director. Tesla’s exceptional range means the cars can function like normal company cars, but if drivers choose another brand of electric car Ogilvie is asking for secondary confirmation to ensure drivers are aware that official ranges may not be achievable in real life. “Some drivers are then reverting from electric to PHEV if the electric range does not work for them,” said Hardy.

Demand for PHEVs higher than for EVs David Bushnell, principal consultant, Alphabet, said PHEVs account for 60 to 70% of the leasing company’s plug-in orders, reflecting the lack of electric cars with viable long-distance range, the absence of pure electric station wagons, and the limited choice of mid-size cars without paying premium prices. In these circumstances a PHEV offers a stepping stone to a pure electric car next time, once the recharging infrastructure has developed, he said. But the internal combustion engine still has a future, especially among higher mileage drivers, said Bushnell. “We will see manufacturers continue to improve CO2 emissions through mild hybrid technology, so I do not see the complete death of petrol or diesel,” he said.

EXAMPLE BASED ON UK COMPANY CAR TAX Company car drivers pay benefit in kind tax based on a percentage of its official price (called the P11D value) determined by the CO2 emissions of their car. This calculation generates a benefit in kind tax charge, which

employees pay at their marginal tax rate. This is 20% for basic rate tax payers earning up to £50,000; 40% for higher rate tax payers’earnings between £50,001 to £150,000; and 45% for earnings above £150,000.

FULL ELECTRIC CO2 (g/km)

2020-21 % BIK Rate

2021-22 2022-23 % BIK Rate % BIK Rate 1

2020-21

Example: Tesla Model 3 • Price: £39,500 • CO2 emissions: 0g/km

2021-22

Benefit in £0 kind tax charge Annual company car tax

2022-23

£39,500 x 1% = £395

• Basic rate tax • Basic rate tax payer: £0 payer: £395 x 20% = £79 • Higher rate tax • Higher rate tax payer: £0 payer: £395 x 40% = £158

£39,500 x 2% = £790 • Basic rate tax payer: £790 x 20% = £158 • Higher rate tax payer: £790 x 40% = £316

HYBRID & PHEV PHEV

CO2 (g/km)

Electric range Miles / km

2020-21 % BIK Rate

1-50

130+ / 208

1-50

70-129 / 112-207

1-50

40-69 / 64-111

1-50

30-39 / 38-63

1-50

<30 / <48

2021-22 % BIK Rate

2022-23 % BIK Rate

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For a hybrid or PHEV, company car tax charge depends on emissions of 1-50g/km CO2 (WLTP) and how far the car can drive in zero emission mode. Five bands cover these different distances, ranging from fewer than 30 miles (48km) to more than 130 miles (208km).

NEW ENERGIES

2020-21

Example: MINI Countryman PHEV • Price: £31,825 • CO2 emissions: 43g/km • Zero emission range: 28.6 miles / 46km

2021-22

Benefit in £31,825 x 12% kind tax = £3,819 charge

£31,825 x 13% = £4,137.25

£31,825 x 14% = £4,455.50

Annual company car tax

• Basic rate tax payer: £3,819 x 20% = £763.80

• Basic rate tax payer: £4,137.25 x 20% = £827.45

• Basic rate tax payer: £4,455.50 x 20% = £891.10

• Higher rate tax payer: £3,819 x 40% = £1,527.60

• Higher rate tax • Higher rate tax payer: £4,137.25 x payer: £4,455.50 40% = £1,654.90 x 40% = £1,782.2

2020-21

Example: BMW 330e

2021-22

Benefit in £37,820 x 10% = kind tax £3,782 charge

• Price: £37,820 • CO2 emissions: 37g/km • Zero emission range: 36 miles / 58km

2022-23

Annual company car tax

2022-23

£37,820 x 11% = £4,160.20

£37,820 x 12% = £4,538.40

• Basic rate tax • Basic rate tax pay- • Basic rate tax payer: £4,160.20 x payer: £4,538.40 er: £3,782 x 20% = x 20% = £907.68 20% = £832.04 £756.40 • Higher rate tax payer: £3,782 x 40% = £1,512.80

• Higher rate tax • Higher rate tax payer: £4,160.20 x payer: £4,538.40 x 40% = £1,1815.36 40% = £1,664.08

PETROL AND DIESEL Benefit in kind tax for company cars with an internal combustions engine is based on their CO2 emissions, with a further supplement of four percentage points for diesel cars that are not RDE2 compatible.

Car CO2 (g/km)

2020-21 % BIK Rate Petrol & RDE2 diesel

2021-22 % BIK Rate

Non-RDE2 diesel

Petrol & RDE2 diesel

Non-RDE2 diesel

51-54

75-79

+1 (max 37%)

160-164

165-169

170+

2020-21

Example: Ford Focus 1.0 petrol

FLEET EUROPE #116

Non-RDE2 diesel

+1-5g/km

• Price: £20,645 • CO2 emissions: 98g/km

Petrol & RDE2 diesel

2022-23 % BIK Rate

Benefit in £20,645 x 22% = kind tax £4,541.90 charge Annual company car tax

2021-22 £20,645 x 23% = £4,748.35

2022-23 £20,645 x 24% = £4,954.80

• Basic rate tax • Basic rate tax • Basic rate tax payer: £4,748.35 x payer: £4,954.80 payer: £4,541.90 x 20% = £990.96 20% = £949.67 x 20% = £908.38 • Higher rate tax • Higher rate tax • Higher rate tax payer: £4,748.35 x payer: £4,954.80 payer: £4,541.90 x 40% = £1,981.92 x 40% = £1,816.76 40% = £1,899.34

CONNECTED

IN-CAR INFOTAINMENT MORE DANGEROUS THAN ALCOHOL @DieterQuartier

Previous research showed that the use of a smartphone behind the wheel is extremely dangerous. A new study now reveals that even Google’s and Apple’s in-car phone integration systems, which were designed to enhance safety, carry more risks than intoxication.

Reaction times at motorway speeds increased average stopping distances to between four and five car lengths, drivers took their eyes off the road for as long as 16 seconds while driving. Moreover, using touch control resulted in reaction times that were even worse than when texting while driving. Controlling the vehicle’s position in the lane and keeping a consistent speed and distance to the vehicle in front suffered significantly. Also, participants often failed to react to a stimulus on the road ahead, with reaction times being more than 50% slower. “Individuals driving for work are just as at risk as the general public, so we would also encourage employers to review their advice and policies in light of this research,” says Neil Greig, Director of Policy & Research, IAM RoadSmart. He is calling for a review of these systems, which could include disabling touchscreens while the vehicle is moving – much like SafeDrivePod does with your smartphone screen. Carmakers like BMW and Volvo are developing systems that track the driver’s eye movement through on-board cameras, triggering a warning or even braking action if need be. This technology is a key enabler of the next step in autonomous driving: cars will do most of the job, but the driver must stay alert and be able to intervene immediately when necessary.

HOW DRIVERS’ REACTION TIMES SLOW Drink-drive limit1

12% 21% Using cannabis 27% Hands-free phone 30% Android Auto (Voice)

This chart shows the percentage increase in distracted drivers’ response times. An undistracted driver typically reacts in 1 second.

35% Texting 36% Apple CarPlay (Voice) 46% Hand-held phone 53% Android Auto (Touch) 57% Apple CarPlay (Touch) Source: IAM RoadSmart study www.iamroadsmart.com/infotainment ©Transport Research Laboratory 1 Drink-drive limit in England, Wales and Northern Ireland 2020

TIPS TO AVOID DRIVER DISTRACTION

1 SafeDrivePod

A coin-sided device in the car blocks the screen of your smartphone while you are driving, but you can still receive calls. You can also fully use navigation apps, either on the phone or via Apple CarPlay, which is both a pro (practicality) and a con (safety).

2 Use voice commands

Most new cars have advanced speech technology and so have the latest smartphones. Use these virtual assistants to set a navigation destination, dictate text messages, enquire about traffic, start a playlist, and so on.

3 Set your destination beforehand.

Rather than getting in the car and start fiddling with the touchscreen while you are already driving, set the address in your phone before you go out the door and transfer it to your car so it’s ready to go when you get behind the wheel.

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The largest independent British road safety charity IAM RoadSmart recently conducted a simulator study entitled “Interacting with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay when driving.” The results show that the latest in-vehicle infotainment systems impair reaction times behind the wheel more than alcohol and cannabis use.

SAFETY

STEPS TO A SAFER FLEET Jonathan Manning

Lower your risk, cut your collision rates and reduce your insurance premiums with a well-structured safety programme.

not view fleet safety in 1 Do isolation

board needs to take the 3 The lead

“A lot of organisations will have robust practices, procedures and policies for safety in their manufacturing plants,” said Mr Cuerden. “It is strategically important that road safety is seen as no less important.”

These are the executives who influence middle managers.

Road safety has to be perceived at all levels of a business as part of its normal operational procedures and practices, said Andy Cuerden, Managing Director, Europe, eDriving.

the benefits of an effec2 Sell tive road safety programme internally

“Ensure the senior leadership teams understand how detrimental road safety practices or a laissez-faire attitude can negatively impact on how they operate as a business,” said Mr Cuerden.

FLEET EUROPE #116

“They may not perceive how much vehicle collisions are costing and how much of an impact they are having on the bottom line.” One of eDriving’s first clients, BT, found that in the early 2000s, collisions and other road incidents were costing it $25 million in direct losses and three to four times more in indirect costs. In business terms, it took approximately 600,000 product sales to cover the annual cost of fleet claims.

“Get your strategy right first, get the leadership engaged and get them to drive the ownership of any road safety initiative or programme,” said Mr Cuerden.

4 Engage line managers

The people who manage drivers on a day-to-day basis have a huge role to play in reinforcing safety messages and ensuring that operational demands do not compromise employee safety. Unrealistic targets for the number of client visits that staff should make during a day and expecting employees to receive phone calls while driving can significantly increase road risk. “There should not be a conflict between keeping employees safe and asking them to perform their operational duties effectively,” said Mr Cuerden. “Ensure managers understand that allowing employees to perform their day-to-day tasks in a safe manner will lead to more consistent business performance. If a driver is off the road two or three times per year because a vehicle is getting repaired or they are injured, then the downtime operationally is far greater than trying to insist they make one or two extra calls per day, which might lead them to speed.”

Andy Cuerden: “There should not be a conflict between keeping employees safe and asking them to perform their operational duties effectively.”

and encourage 5 Support drivers

Make sure every driver knows what is expected of them, said Mr Cuerden. “This is where your policy comes in. Drivers need to be aware that they have responsibilities as individuals to perform their driving in a responsible manner.” Safety policies have to be well-managed, well-policed and well-respected to be effective, added Mr Cuerden, but they also need to be infused with the message that organisations want their employees to be safe.

“It can’t just be policies that punish,” he said. “Drivers need to be encouraged, they need support, they need to be coached, they need to know where they can go if they need help.”

safety policies must 6 Road cover all drivers

“Any individual who drives for work should be seen within the scope of an overall road safety programme,” said Mr Cuerden. “Companies should not just focus on the known risk – people with a company car or a cash allowance.”

7 Deploy smart technology

Data from tracking technology, whether telematics or smartphone apps, can deliver valuable insight into driver behaviour and risk. Incidents of harsh acceleration and braking, aggressive cornering and excessive speed are powerful indicators of higher risk drivers.

“It acts like a personal coach,” said Mr Cuerden. “Drivers become self-policing and self-improving because the app gives them the opportunity to look at events and contains training courses and videos. For example, if Mentor identifies that someone is using their phone while driving, their playlist would be around distracted driving. If there’s lots of harsh braking it will provide a course about avoiding rear-end collisions.” Multinational water and hygiene company Ecolab trialled Mentor with over 500 drivers and achieved a 30% reduction in collisions per million miles in just six months. The results were so promising that the company is rolling the app out to 12,000 drivers in North America, then globally.

eDriving’s Mentor app gives drivers personal scores at the end of each journey, as well as over time.

Sarah Bechtold, Ecolab Director of Global Driver Safety, said data from the system showed conclusively that drivers who had accidents “had significantly more risky driving behaviours compared to drivers without accidents.” Drivers with a FICO Safe Driving Score (the driving equivalent of the FICO credit rating) of below 710 were twice as likely to have an accident within the next three months as those with a score above 710.

rely on vehicle 8 Don’t technology

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), such as autonomous emergency braking and lane assist, are helping to cut accident rates. But Mr Cuerden emphasised: “It’s still the individual’s responsibility to make sure a vehicle is being driven safely. You cannot become over reliant on technology; it’s individuals who make hundreds of different choices every time they drive.”

drivers with a variety 9 Engage of approaches

Every individual responds differently to triggers to modify their driving behaviour, said Mr Cuerden, and organisations need to give drivers the greatest chance to take on board safety messages. “For some that’s gamification; others will react to communication from their managers; some will respond to messages from on high,” he said.

10 Keep the message fresh

One of the hardest elements of a road safety programme is maintaining engagement. Using fresh messages and new resources to sustain driver interest is vital, said Mr Cuerden. “It’s important that the programme is effective, continuous and engaging,” he said.

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eDriving’s Mentor app gives drivers personal scores at the end of each journey, as well as over time, on their performance, benchmarks them against colleagues, and offers constructive feedback on how to improve.

AUTONOMOUS

OEMS HIT THE BRAKES TO MANAGE AUTONOMOUS EXPECTATIONS Mark Sutcliffe

Fully autonomous company cars which allow drivers to send emails and conduct virtual meetings on the road are still some way off, but robotaxis and driverless shuttle buses may be just around the corner. While autonomous vehicle trials in the US dominate the headlines – sometimes for the wrong reasons – European states dominate the global league table for readiness and acceptance of AVs.

Theoretically, the technology exists in the here and now, but as three well-publicised fatalities in the United States demonstrate, wholesale adoption of driverless cars on the public highway is still some way off.

Compiled by consultancy KPMG, the Autonomous Vehicles Readiness Index provides a country-by country barometer of each individual nation’s preparedness for the arrival of AVs. To compile the index, KPMG researchers analyse infrastructure investment, technological capability, legal and policy-making framework and consumer attitudes to the adoption of new technology.

Consultants at Deloitte discovered significant resistance to autonomous vehicles in their latest Global Automotive Consumer Study. “Consumers remain sceptical of AV safety, but we believe there will be a longer-term trend toward gradual acceptance of AVs as familiarity with the technology increases and as the benefits of self-driving cars are demonstrated,” said Thomas Schiller, European automotive leader, Deloitte Germany. Most of the European AV trials have taken place in more controlled environments – although limited trails of AVs took place in both London and Paris during 2019 (see boxout).

The 2020 index was topped by the Netherlands for the second year in succession, with Norway, Sweden, Finland, the UK and Germany all making the Top 10. The US, where Waymo, GM and Uber are conducting high-profile live trials on public roads was ranked 4th in the tble – dropping from third place in 2018.

FLEET EUROPE #116

The 2020 Index is due to be published in April, so what trends is the latest iteration of this eagerly anticipated analysis likely to identify?

Partial autonomy: the safety dividend Quantum leaps in autonomous technology such as Tesla’s Autopilot have skewed many consumers’ expectations of how rapidly the switch to fully autonomous vehicles will unfold.

In the shorter term, the EU has given the evolution of autonomous technology additional impetus with the ratification of new laws which make partial autonomy not only more likely – but actually a legal requirement. From 2022, a new EC policy framework will make a package of semi-autonomous road safety devices mandatory on all new cars sold in the EU. These include: Autonomous Emergency Braking, Lane Departure Assist and Intelligent Speed Assistance – all of which make proactive use of autonomous technology to avoid accidents and improve road safety.

Håkan Samuelsson, CEO, Volvo Cars: “It would be irresponsible for carmarkers to overstate the capabilities of AVs.” These new laws put connected and autonomous vehicle technology at the heart of a concerted effort to halve the 25,000 fatalities recorded every year on the roads of Europe and are likely to play a significant role in shifting consumer perceptions to autonomous technologies.

Long term: full autonomy by 2030? In the meantime, a growing number of tech companies, start-ups and academic-commercial partnerships continue to develop autonomous technologies in Europe. In the medium term, the OEM’s focus on AV technology has polarised quite dramatically over the last year. Partial autonomy (up to level 3) is still seen as a viable evolution for private cars, but higher levels of 4 and 5 are increasingly

AV TRIALS IN EUROPE Paris-Saclay Autonomous Lab

being focused on public transport providers for robotaxis or shuttle buses. Level 3 AVs are capable of driving independently but may still require the driver to intervene under certain circumstances. Whereas level 4 and 5 autonomous vehicles render human intervention either partially or wholly redundant. Oxford-based autonomous technology start-up Oxbotica, which is running a fleet of AVs on public roads in the UK, is preparing to commercialise AV technology within closed environments. Speaking to Fleet Europe last year, Oxbotica Vice President, Commercial, Richard Jinks said: “We are still a long way off fully autonomous vehicles that don’t require any human intervention at all, but we will see the deployment of autonomous vehicles in geo-fenced areas happening quite rapidly over the next couple of years.” “We will see the rapid development of driverless shuttles operating in restricted areas, followed by vehicles which are capable of operating in ‘safe lanes’ on the public highway.”

“The shift to a shared economy will lead to a wider acceptance of shared transportation rather than ownership and everyone sees a big opportunity here in the transportation of the future.” Last year, PSA CEO Carlos Tavares said he couldn’t see a business case for investing to develop AVs of level 3 and above for the retail market and Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo Cars CEO, tends to agree. Despite being an early proponent of autonomous vehicles, at a press conference last year, Mr Samuelsson said it would be irresponsible for carmarkers to overstate the capabilities of AVs, which risked creating confusion among drivers. Volvo is working closely with ride-hailing platform Uber to develop autonomous robotaxis and head of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group Eric Meyhofer also stressed the safety angle: “Working in close agreement with companies like Volvo is a key ingredient to effectively building a safe, scalable, self-driving fleet.”

UK Autodrive

The UK Government-supported Autodrive Project trialled a range of autonomous vehicles in Milton Keynes and Coventry over a three-year period starting in 2015. The vehicles themselves – supplied by Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, Tata Motors and autonomous pod specialist Aurrigo – tested two distinct classes of technology: connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles.

HumanDrive

Last November, the Nissan-led HumanDrive AV research consortium completed a 230-mile self-navigated journey on UK public roads. The specially prepared electric Nissan LEAF used a combination of GPS, radar, LIDAR and cameras to complete the journey, negotiating complex roundabouts, motorways, junctions, and highspeed country lanes without road markings, white lines, or kerbs.

FLEET EUROPE #116

Renault extended AV testing to the French capital after the successful completion of a pilot scheme in Rouen.

Renault extended AV testing to the French capital after the successful completion of a pilot scheme in Rouen. The tests took place in the suburb of Saclay, to the southwest of the capital, where five AVs operated on dedicated lanes and public and campus streets alongside the existing Saclay Plateau transportation systems.

REMARKETING

CORONAVIRUS AFFECTS TURKISH CAR MARKET Anna Özdelen

Second-hand vehicle prices in Turkey rallied to record highs in the beginning of the year. Now market dynamics are changing amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Reasons for retail prices increase “The Turkish currency crisis of 2018 resulted in a significant depreciation of the Turkish lira. Both distributors and dealers could not predict when the economic downturn would end. As a result, they did not replenish their inventories on time. This is how the surge in car prices started,” explains Cenk Guler, founder of the vehicle valuation platform Roadmark. Indeed, the data published by Turkey’s Automotive Distributors Association (ODD) indicates that new vehicle sales began to recover in August 2019.

FLEET EUROPE #116

As new vehicle supply appeared to be insufficient, demand for used cars climbed in the same quarter. According to the analysis of EBS Danismanlik, a Turkey-based consulting company specialising in automotive market analytics, the ratio of used to new vehicles increased from 11.2 in 2018 to 16.1 in 2019, affecting market prices. “New vehicle prices increased by 30% in 2019. However, the highest rise was

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As the upward trend continued in 2020, diesel vehicle prices witnessed a steep increase of 20% in December 2019 – January 2020. The average price of a petrol vehicle hiked by 6% over the same period.

200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 JAN-18

For diesel vehicles, that represent over half of all passenger cars sold in Turkey, the value surged from TL125,608 to TL155,344.

AVERAGE PRICES: DIESEL AND PETROL VEHICLES, 2017-2020, TURKEY

Average Price (Thousands Turkish Lira)

The figures reported by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) show that the average retail price of a petrol vehicle in Turkey rose from 96,662 Turkish lira in 2018 to 120,084 in 2019.

Source: TurkStat

felt in the used car market. Amid the growing demand for used vehicles, especially in the age group of 0-3 years, the struggles to find a car and supply shortages caused prices to rise by 20% above the normal level. This change was gradually reflected in the pricing of the 4-7 and 8-10 age groups,” says Erol Sahin, General Manager of EBS Danismanlik.

The sales volume of new passenger cars and light commercial vehicles hit a 74,395 unit mark in the first two months of 2020, a roughly 90% growth compared to the same period of 2019.

“In February, a BMW 2019 3.20i M Sport with a 5,000km mileage had a price tag of TL455,000. On the other hand, a brand new vehicle, including the special consumption and valueadded taxes, stood at TL413,000,” confirms Cenk Guler.

However, the coronavirus outbreak changed dynamics. The pandemic is raising concerns about the effect it may have on the automotive market in Turkey.

Future Expectations Until recently, the industry participants anticipated a return of the vehicle prices and sales volumes to the normal level once the supply issues get resolved. The recent report published by Turkey’s Automotive Distributors Association (ODD) predicted the rebound of the auto market.

Passenger car sales went up by nearly 98%, totalling 59,743 units. The market for light commercial vehicles expanded by 62%, reaching 14,652 units.

Although it is hard to predict the extent of the damage, it is clear that the market entered a period of stagnation. “The year started with recovery. Currency exchange rates stabilised and interest rates dropped. But right now sales stopped. The trend will continue in the next 1-2 months. Second-hand car prices began a downward trend,” says Erol Sahin.

2 0 2 0 In these challenging times, there is always something to look forward toâ&#x20AC;¦

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