“Are your drivers paying attention? It could be costly!”

…I gave BrightFleet a call and was speaking with Michael Bragg who is obviously excited about driver training. He offered and I accepted his challenge and went through a demo of their on-line driver training. I was surprised at how real it all was.You actually “drive” down the street as different real life situations unfold. I found the program to be both fun to do and very enlightening. The fun part is important as it makes you want to do it. As for being enlightened let’s just say it was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be…

It was great talking with Steve about BrightFleet and his 360FuelCard programs that help companies reduce their fuel costs while providing an environmental edge.

BrightFleet’s™ mission is to provide a globally-available risk identification and mitigation system, all in one easily administered and affordable solution available immediately for fleets of any size and type.

“Our state-of-the-art Hazard Perception Evaluation application is a predictive behavior analysis tool designed to identify a fleet’s high risk drivers based on their ability to identify dangerous situations that happen every day on our roadways”, said Michael Bragg of Compendium Software Systems, the company behind the BrightFleet™ brand.

While BrightFleet™ will focus solely on providing advanced technologies to fleet operators on a global scale, FuelClinic™ http://www.fuelclinic.com will continue to focus on providing motorists fuel efficiency improving eco-driving advice, techniques, and progress-tracking software.

“We love the FuelClinic community, and plan to continue to increase the level of service we provide to the eco-drivers there”, said Bragg. “We also relize that the fleet risk management and mitigation products we offer are a more natural fit under the new BrightFleet™ brand.”

To learn more about BrightFleet™, visit the website at http://www.brightfleet.com

“The collection part of the first phase is done, and the data collected by the devices will be uploaded to our servers for processing. Based on what we find using our driver behavior analysis software, we’ll make recommendations to the City on ways it can cut it’s yearly fuel usage, helping the City to reduce expenses.” said Michael Bragg of Compendium.

The pilot program is being used to allow the City to evaluate the driver behavior monitoring system, and look for ways to save the City money by cutting it’s fuel usage and reducing risk. The system works by collecting data from the vehicles on-board diagnostic computer, providing the fleet manager a real-world look into how their fleet vehicles are being driven. In this first generation system, the devices are removed from the vehicle and the data is uploaded to a central processing server using a standard USB cable and a bit of software that handles the communications.

Once the data is uploaded, the processing of weeks worth of real world driver behavior data begins. The hub of this system is software that accepts driving data from a variety of devices and sources. It parses the data into a standardized format, and begins to look for trends that indicate inefficient or risky driver behavior. It then compiles reports to allow fleet managers to quickly identify problems within their fleet.

Compendium’s recent channel-partnership with Alert Driving provides clients with access to top-tier online training modules to help mitigate problems with driver behavior or fuel efficiency using proven training tools that are targeted, easy to administer, and affordable.

“Our whole goal is to make fleets of any size safer and more efficient, providing a substantial ROI to clients by getting more out of every gallon of fuel they purchase while at the same time helping reduce accidents and related costs” said Bragg. “We are cherry-picking the best practices and technologies already used in major fleets, and re-packaging them into right-sized systems that any business can afford.”

Every “million mile mark” is a cause for a little celebration, considering the humble beginnings and modest means that have so far contributed to the building of this community of conscientious consumers. All of our members wanting to learn a little more about their habits, all seeking to improve their efficiency – and save some money at the same time.

Some of you have entered a few receipts and moved on, some of you have been keeping records for over a year. All of you have suffered with this prototype site, it’s shortcomings, and my own fits and starts.

Thank you for you time and continued patience as we build FuelClinic into the foundation of a wonderful tool that will help even more people save some money and help improve the quality and safety of our travels for all of us.

- Michael

ITS Congestion Challenge

The first global ITS Congestion Challenge, announced in June 2009, was open to entrepreneurs, commuters, transportation experts, researchers in all fields, universities, and citizens around the world. Three winners and six finalists from Hungary, Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States, were selected by an open global community of more than 4,000 people, including transportation industry professionals and the general public.

1st PLACE

iCarpool provides commuters and other travelers with comprehensive travel choices for modes of travel other than driving alone. Read more.

2nd PLACE

FuelClinic, for their “Eco-System” and “Eco-Driver On Board” programs, which provide tools and certified eco-driving training to improve, track, and manage driver performance for increased fuel efficiency, increased driver safety, and reduced accident rates. Read more.

3rd PLACE

iCone Products, LLC, for an ITS concept to beam real-time traffic information over the Internet to a central web site for use by government officials, emergency response personnel, trucking fleets, the public and information resellers, including media outlets and GPS services. Read more.

…In a nutshell, FuelClinic.com is “a driver-improvement system that helps create safer, smarter, more efficient drivers,” according to the company Web site. “In consumer applications this system helps families save money on fuel, reduce [carbon] emissions, find deficiencies in inexperienced or young drivers, and helps motorists become generally safer and more professional drivers.”

Bragg also is working on a professional application targeted at businesses and fleet managers that, he said, helps them train employees, reduce fuel expenses and reinforce safety initiatives.

Bragg said one of his goals is to take the idea of fuel savings more mainstream, away from the traditional dedicated, hybrid-driving environmentalist who makes a second career out of saving fuel. Bragg is not telling people that they have to buy a Toyota Prius — he still has that four-wheel-drive truck, in fact — but he is saying that by modifying your driving habits, your routes and other easily manageable changes, you can save a lot of fuel, and a lot of money… ( read the rest )

Judging from new user sign-ups, the article is a huge hit. I’d like to welcome all of the new members, and ask that you let me know what you enjoy about the site, and what you’d like to see changed or improved.

The challenge from June through August. The VenCorps community reviewed and rated the 116 participating startups on five criteria: the speed and efficiency of their solutions; behavioral impact; safety; sustainability; and economic competitiveness. Based on community ratings, nine finalists were picked for the 30-day Showdown. During the Showdown, community members allocated VenCorps Points to their favorite challengers.

In this video Gerry Mooney, IBM General Manager Fiscal Stimulus & Economic Recovery, talks about IBM’s commitment to helping solve traffic congestion problems and their intention to support some of the innovative new ideas that made it into the final round of the Challenge.

This sounds like an outstanding opportunity.

What happens next?

Over the next 30 days each solution provider will answer common questions investors ask, share detailed biographies of their teams, make slide presentations, perform due diligence calls and get publicly rated by expert judges.

During the Showdown the community will pick the winner through a predictive market. That means you can allocate your points to one or more solutions. The solution with the most community support wins a $50,000 investment and 50,000 points.  

It’s very encouraging to be selected as a finalist – we are up against some very well thought out solutions, some obviously well funded and nearly production-ready.

If you’ve been following this project for any amount of time, you’ve seen us struggle and change in several ways, always growing and refining the concepts along the way. This is another great opportunity for growth, and with recent partnerships and changes – and your continued support – I believe we have a real chance of winning this contest.

Again a huge “thank you” for those of you who have supported FuelClinic this far!

Far from a model of energy-efficiency, the CARS (Cash for Clunkers) program creates a system that encourages mind-boggling waste of energy, money, and natural resources.

The word “clunker” makes you think of cars with no real value left, in poor mechanical shape, incredibly inefficient, outdated, unsafe, and already a problem for the owner. The government program assumes the clunker is such a problem that the it requires that the “trade-ins” drive-train be destroyed within 2 days, else the dealer is fined $15,000. In reality, there are perfectly good vehicles with lots of value remaining – and can get measurably much better mileage if driven efficiently - being turned in and destroyed. 

Take for example this video of a decidedly “un-clunky” Volvo S40 or S80 being destroyed as part of the CARS program. All of the energy used to produce that car is completely wasted, even if it would still have value in the used car market.

WARNING: This is a surprisingly graphic video – especially if you are a “car guy”. This top-quality machine literally screams as the “liquid glass” solution (used in place of motor oil) scours the moving parts inside this engine, eventually overheating it enough to start a fire in the engine compartment, and puking it’s last remaining ounces of red-hot oil out onto the ground in front of it as it finally seizes up.

Some thoughts on this video:

1. That’s a well engineered, safe, and fairly efficient high-quality car that apparently ran well when turned in.
2. It has obvious value remaining (KBB says around $13K).
3. I can’t believe it ran for over 4 minutes with sodium silicate instead of oil. 
4. Thank goodness it didn’t puke up that red-hot oil all over the young man as he reached across the engine to put the oil fill cap (?) back on.  

On Wednesday it was announced that the program was suspended – some say it was because dealership couldn’t get their paperwork filed fast enough to not go bankrupt in the short-term, others said it was because the program was too successful and already “spent” all of it’s funding. Then yesterday it was announced that the program would be re-funded, using grants previously slated for other energy-efficiency improvement programs. 

I propose a different plan called: “Cash for Un-Clunkers”

Can anyone answer me “why” we should scrap perfectly good cars instead of invest in improving driving habits?

I went to the database and back to my feedback emails, and found a few members who were obviously using the system regularly, were interested enough to communicate with me about the site and ideas or problems they had, and might possibly want to participate in a case study. I sent a few requests, received a few responses, including one from John Guercio.

From logs and emails I knew John had been using the system a long time, and when I asked him if he’d be interested in talking with Kathy he said “sure”. While I knew he was a “regular”, and I had assumed he was benefiting from using the site, I didn’t have any idea how he had been using the system – pushing it to it’s limits, and saving himself thousands of dollars.

Here’s how it starts:

John was used to receiving an occasional $2,000 expense check for his mileage. But when his company put him on a strict $750 a month expense plan, John knew it was time to take control of his MPGs and start paying better attention to the pain he would soon being feeling at the pump.

To do this, he turned to FuelClinic.com, the Web’s premiere online fuel efficiency tracking and driver improvement resource. His main interest was in tracking his Jetta’s miles per gallon for work-related trips to determine whether or not the new stipend was helping him make money, or causing him to lose it.

Find out how well it worked out for John, how he was able to track his expenses, improve his fuel mileage, decide NOT to get that new car he was looking at, and saved thousands of dollars in taxes last year.

Read the rest of it online, or download the PDF version.

If you are interested in participating in future case studies, please send a note to me at feedback@fuelclinic.com - we are currently looking to create a case study detailing how a small business w/ a small fleet of vehicles has used FuelClinic.com in some way to save money, improve mileage, or track consumption.

Thanks John! Thanks Kathy!

Included were some fresh details about our planned eco-driving training event later this summer…

Recent teaming efforts with driving instructor and test driving big-wigs John Henry and Steve Garrod are on track, quite literally. In conjunction with Digital Eye Systems and their EcoRoadCam fleet management technology and the Driver’s Instructors Association, Fuel Clinic is bringing an eco-driving course to Central Florida Racing Complex in September. With a combination of track-time and classroom instruction, students will learn smart eco-driving techniques. The technologies behind Fuel Clinic and EcoRoadCam will document and compare their performance lap-to-lap.

We’ll bring you more information right here as these plans develop.

FuelClinic determines how well your car is managing its fuel consumption. After you sign up for the site, you need only to input your car’s information, tell the service how much you spent the last couple times you filled up, and the site will return calculations on your miles per gallon and how much you will be spending on gas going forward. It’s not the most advanced fuel-monitoring service in this roundup, but it’s simple, which might make it attractive to some.

We certainly are trying to keep things as simple as possible. Thanks for the great write-up Don Reisinger.

No More Chasing Investment (for now)

You may have noticed that development has stalled on new features like the Twitter interface and the training modules. Over the past two months we’ve been actively seeking start-up funding so that we may go full-time in continuing the development of the site. This has taken a tremendous amount of time and effort.

While we’ve received a good deal of very positive feedback, our timing was very poor. The economic downturn since September, coupled with the dramatic drop in fuel prices since November, has made it very difficult to get past the “Gee you have a good idea, come back to talk to us in six months” stage. Overall, it was a very worth-while effort, as continued business-plan development has really helped us find and focus on our core model.

We’re keeping a few investment doors open, but are no longer counting on investment until Summer 2009 at the soonest, and are not actively chasing investment. This means we’ll continue to boot-strap FuelClinic.com development for the foreseeable future, and development of new features (as opposed to seeking funding sources) will again be the focus of our limited resources.

FuelClinic.com helps users reduce fuel consumption and fuel costs by learning and practicing better driving habits. There are simple tools for tracking mileage performance, coupled with to-be-developed training modules called ‘clinics’ which will clearly demonstrate fuel-saving behaviors.

Users practice the fuel saving behaviors in their own vehicles, and use the on-line tracking tools to monitor their own success. The system automatically tracks performance trends. The clinics with the ‘best’ results across multiple users will gain in ranking, and be recommended to users with similar vehicles.

A commercial version of this application is also being planned. While there are several other sites that help people track their mileage, none of these sites proactively attempt to improve the mileage of its members.

Show you support for FuelClinic by adding your vote at KillerStartups.com (no registration required).

He raced as a rookie nationals driver, starting 17th and moving up to 15th by the end of the race. 

Mike said in a recent email: “Well the race was a real adventure.  We started 17Th out of an 18 car field and finished 15Th., so at least we went the right direction.  What a tough race week, if something can go wrong it will, but I glad we went and it created memories for a lifetime.” 

I wish my wife and I could have been there in person for the race, but we had a wedding to attend (ours!).

We congratulate Mike and his crew for his success in overcoming all obstacles getting to and qualifying for the championship, and look forward to next year’s racing season!