Okay, quick quiz: What’s the difference between “Roll Stability Control” and “Electronic Stability Control?” Do you know the answer? Here’s a hint: Roll Stability Control (RSC) is sometimes referred to as “roll-only stability,” while Electronic Stability Control (ESC) is sometimes referred to as “full stability.”

Still stumped? Well, you’re not alone. It turns out a lot of fleet professionals have a hard time distinguishing between the two, which is why Bendix has recently published a white paper (available here within the week) called “Road Map for the Future: Making the Case for Full-Stability.” The new paper, as Bendix described to the media in a conference call this week, will help fleet managers understand how the systems differ, and why “full stability” ESC is the best choice for many fleets.

Why is this important? Two reasons. First, stability control systems are being touted as the most effective vehicle safety system since the seat belt; they can save lives, reduce property damage, and keep our highways safer for everyone. Second, the government may someday mandate them. To quote the white paper: “Regulators have already validated the impact stability systems can have on the safety of our nation’s highways. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has mandated ESP/ESC stability systems for passenger cars, light trucks, and SUVs. The regulation takes effect with the 2009 model year, and full compliance is required by the 2012 model year. Currently, NHTSA is considering additional regulation relative to stability technology for Class 6, 7, and 8 air-braked combination vehicles.” Need I say more?

You need to know about this technology, what it does, how it works, and what it can do for your fleet. Bendix’s white paper may not answer all your questions, but as a primer in stability control systems it’s hard to beat.

Oh, and the difference between RSC and ESC? Simply put, RSC detects directional changes in the vehicle, and takes corrective action if it calculates that a directional change will cause a rollover. ESC detects directional changes in the vehicle and compares them to driver input to determine if the vehicle is going in the direction the driver intends. If it’s not, ESC can intervene in vehicle control to a greater extent than RSC to prevent a rollover and keep the vehicle moving in the right direction. There’s more to it, of course. Want to know more? Read the paper.

The other day I visited Madison, our state capitol, to meet with Maria Redmond, the Biofuels Sector Specialist for the state’s Office of Energy Independence, because I wanted to learn what my state is doing to address the fuel crisis. Our Governor, Jim Doyle, had recently issued an Executive Order directing state fleets to increase their use of renewable fuels, especially biodiesel and E85 ethanol. One of Redmond’s jobs is to work with state fleet directors to make sure they are meeting the Governor’s goals, both in terms of adding alternative fuel vehicles to the state’s fleet and making sure that state employees are actually using alternative fuels in those vehicles. It’s a big job, but I was very impressed by the way Redmond addressed the challenge, by providing her fleet clients with all the tools and resources her budget would allow.

That night I had dinner with friends in Madison, and our hostess, Kristen, a state employee, mentioned in the course of conversation that she often uses a state car in her work. I asked her if she drove a flex-fuel vehicle, and she said yes. Then I asked her if she ever fills it up with E85 ethanol, and she said, “I don’t know where to find it.”

My eyes lit up. “I can help you with that,” I said, and I proceeded to tell her what Redmond and I had been discussing that afternoon. The next day I sent Kristen the link to the website Redmond has set up to help state fleets and drivers to locate E85 and biodiesel stations along their routes, and she is sold. She wrote back: “Thanks, Mark. I love the trip planner tool! I’ll definitely start mapping out all my work trips based on these station locations (it will help shave a big expense from my project budget).”

Now, obviously, the fact that Kristen’s bosses hadn’t communicated this to her points to problems with the state’s bureaucracy, but you would expect that. Redmond definitely has her work cut out for her, as her message is not reaching everyone it needs to reach, but it’s not due to any lack of effort on her part. In any case, just because of a chance comment over pizza, one more state employee is using the tools that Redmond has created; she is filling up with a renewable fuel, and she will tell her colleagues, and they will tell their colleagues, and it will grow and grow. Sometimes it’s really that easy to change the world.

When you visit a dozen or more fleet maintenance shops in the course of the year as I do, you see all kinds of facilities. Some are bright, shiny and new, and some are dark, dingy and old. The same goes for the offices where the fleet maintenance managers hang their hats; some are neat, organized and expansive, and some are cramped and crowded and you can hardly find a place to sit down. But I have learned not to judge a book by its cover, because sometimes the most unimpressive-looking maintenance programs have the most impressive maintenance practices.

Case in point: last week I visited a very affluent community to meet the supervisor of transportation for the local school district. The transportation facility was in one of the older sections of town, and when I pulled into the lot I was confused–I couldn’t find the offices. Off in the distance was a ramshackle maintenance garage where a number of yellow school buses were being worked on, but the office was hidden from view. I parked in front of a lopsided shack and decided to start my search by looking inside the shack.

To my surprise, the “shack” turned out to be the nerve center of the transportation program. The building, which seemed so small from outside, actually stretched back quite a ways, and housed several offices and a dispatch station. It was a beehive of activity, and when several friendly staffers directed me to the supervisor’s office, I found a comfortable work den and a couple of managers who are doing pretty amazing work with their fleet. My qualms about the exterior of the building faded away as we got into our conversation, but at one point the supervisor looked around the offices and jokingly explained that, obviously, his department was low on the list of funding priorities for the school district. But at that point it didn’t matter, because even though they may have been low on the totem pole, the people in that office building believed in the importance of what they were doing, and were resoved to get the job done, no matter what limitations they faced. And that’s a good message to send in this day and age.

Timing is everything. Last week I was reading about a new report released by the World Bank that claimed that biofuel production has caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent. This week I read about a new report released by the US Departments of Energy and Agriculture that insists that “the expansion in ethanol and biodiesel consumption is estimated to have increased the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for all food by 0.10-0.15 percentage point.” How do we make sense of this disparity, and which numbers should we believe?

I think you need to look at the sources of these two studies and consider their objectives. The World Bank provides economic and technical assistance to reduce poverty in developing countries. It has also been plagued with corruption scandals throughout most of its history, the most recent one involving Bush crony Paul Wolfowicz giving his girlfriend a cushy job with the bank and being forced to resign as chairman. My guess? The World Bank’s study could easily have been influenced by players who want to keep biofuels from gaining any traction in the market.

How else do you explain the striking contradiction in the findings in the report from the US Dept’s of Energy and Agriculture? That study acknowledges that biofuel production does play a role in food prices, but goes on to say that other, global factors have a much greater impact on rising food prices. Those factors include worldwide droughts, population growth, the declining value of the dollar, and, ironically, high energy prices, which affect the cost of fertilizers and fuel for farming, and make it more expensive to get food to market.

I don’t claim to be an expert on any of this, but as a journalist I read a lot and I talk to a lot of people, and everything I hear from my sources lends weight to the findings of the US DOE/DOA study. Perhaps this study will settle the food vs. fuel debate, and we can move ahead with strategies that ensure both a steady, secure food supply and a healthy biofuel industry.

The irony is so think you’d need the “jaws of life” to cut through it. On the same day that automakers reported their catastrophic sales slide for the month of June, the result of skyrocketing gasoline prices and inefficient product offerings, they also filed their objections to the government’s new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, claiming that improving the fuel economy of the vehicles they manufacture would be disastrous to the auto industry, to consumers and to the nation’s economy.

Are they serious? Who writes their material? Don’t they realize that their sales are nosediving precisely because Americans are rejecting low-mileage vehicles in the face of $4.00 a gallon gasoline?

Remember a few months ago when a reporter asked President Bush if he was concerned about gasoline hitting $4 a gallon, and he replied, “Oh really? Four dollars a gallon? I hadn’t heard that.”? I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to be any more clueless than that, but here come GM, Ford, Chrysler and Toyota to prove me wrong. The automakers complain that the new CAFE standards will cost 82,000 jobs and $29 million in economic activity, and will reduce industry output by 850,000 units. Guess what, guys? It’s already happening, and it’s not because of CAFE standards. You’re losing customers, market share and stock value because you ramped up production of gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs and willfully ignored the nascent market for high-quality, high-mileage cars (not to mention the market for hybrids, flex-fuel vehicles and alternative fuel vehicles). How can you seriously look at what’s happening in the marketplace today and complain that being forced to sell high-mileage vehicles will kill your business? How can you say you didn’t see this coming?