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As always, we try to keep you up to date on the latest trends and issues that face us. Please keep in mind, I don't want to waste your time. Articles will contain generally less than 250 words. Please have a look and give me your feedback. If you want to see the Newsletter archives, there are more than 6-years available on our Newsletter page. Have a look and by all means, forward to a friend. Thanks. Questions? Send me an email!

UPS

UPS may have been routing vehicles to make right turns only since the 1970’s, but it was news to me.  The US National Highway Traffic Safety Association shows that turning left is the cause in 22.2 percent of crashes, as opposed to 1.2 percent for right turns. Using fewer left turns a driver gets finished faster meaning less labor if they are paid by the hour and money wasted on fuel while idling.

UPS calculates a 10% fuel savings using the right-hand turn strategy or 10,000,000 gallons of fuel saved annually. UPS's routing software shaved 20.4 million miles off their routes last year.

The science of vehicle routing can be reviewed here: http://neo.lcc.uma.es/vrp/vrp-flavors/vrp-with-pick-up-and-delivering/. Warning, reading the page will hurt your brain.

Google Waze adopted new routing logic familiar to UPS for years. Commercially available Telogis and RouteSmart provides routing software that will minimize left turns.

Self-Driving Autos by end of year?

Intel has just signed a $15.3 billion deal to acquire computer vision and collision-avoidance company MobileEye

Intel sees cars, more than PC’s as data centers on wheels. It expects that in just a few years self-driving vehicles will generate 4,000GB of data per day and estimates that the vehicle systems, data and services market opportunity will be worth up to $70 billion by 2030.

Intel will be working with BMW and Mobileye to build a fleet of about 40 autonomous cars that will hit U.S. and European roads by the second half of 2017.

As an aside, Mobileye's system was used in cars made by Tesla, which blamed Mobileye for a series of accidents. Mobileye denied its technology was responsible. Tesla is now developing its own platform for assisted driving.

IHS Automotive ( a world leader in critical information) predicts that 10% of new cars sold worldwide in 2035 will be fully driver-less (as in, they won't need any human assistance) and that the technology will become ubiquitous sometime after 2050.

Apple Inc. increased R&D spending faster than the top 14 automakers combined. Go Apple, Go!

Some Thoughts on Happiness

Richard Branson of Virgin is one of my heroes. He sent out a blog by Julyan Davey on happiness. After reading it, my first thought was, this guy is very young. But some of things he had to say resonated. For example, “Humans adapt super quickly to the things money can buy. The first few days of having a mansion are great but after a few weeks it becomes just normal life. But, good relationships, aren’t something that we easily adapt to, so they can sustain and enhance our happiness throughout our lives.” And “Goals that aren’t connected with our values, or the pursuit of experiences that we will soon adapt to, won’t be successful.”

I have always thought that happiness is made up of moments and you must have unhappy moments to appreciate happy moments.  Looking deeper, Branson provides several of his favorite quotes on happiness and a couple that hit the mark are; “Happiness Is Not Something Ready Made. It Comes From Your Own Actions” - Dalai Lama and “Happiness Is Like A Kiss. You Must Share It To Enjoy It” - Bernard Meltzer. Who would have imagined that Meltzer was an attorney who conducted pretrial interrogation of Hermann Göring (Hitler’s 2nd in command) as part of the Nuremberg war crime trials?