The Future of Telematics: Using AI to Protect Fleet Assets

future of telematics

In the transportation industry, we’ve come a long way with telematics. Most of us can’t imagine life without Geotab’s telematics solutions, which enable fleets to better manage their drivers and vehicles by extracting accurate and actionable intelligence from real-time and historical trips data.

But where do we go from here? What’s the future of telematics?

In the months and years to come, expect to see more and more solutions that enable fleet managers to take preventive actions based on fleet data—actions that address potential issues for the health and safety of their fleets.

The solutions that make up the future of telematics will use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide this extra level of protection to our fleets. And they will save us thousands, perhaps even millions, of dollars. So, despite ongoing supply chain difficulties and capacity crunches, the future is, in some ways, looking bright.

How Unplanned Downtime Kills Your Profits

Transportation companies can’t do much about lockdowns, chip shortages, or a volatile global economy. But they can strive to maintain the most reliable fleets possible. The future of telematics is all about using AI to boost the reliability of our fleets.

Highly reliable fleets avoid unplanned downtime. Unplanned downtime can be devastating to your profit margins in several ways:

  • Lost revenue. To put it simply, a truck that’s being worked on is a truck that’s not out on the road making money for you. According to Logity Dispatch, the national average flatbed truck rate as of August 30, 2022 was $3.09 per mile. If a truck earning the average rate drives 55 miles per hour, that’s about $170 per hour in revenue. If that truck breaks down and has to stay off the road for an eight-hour day, you’ve missed out on $1,360 in revenue.
  • Maintenance costs. Next, you must consider the actual costs of repairing broken-down trucks. According to the American Trucking Association (ATA), a roadside mechanical repair costs an average of $491. And towing a truck that needs repairs can cost upwards of $1,000.
  • A ripple effect on the rest of your fleet. For every truck you take off the road for repairs, you’ll probably bring in a different vehicle to replace it. That means the replacement truck will rack up more miles and need repairs sooner than planned.

Staying out in front of potential maintenance issues won’t just deliver incremental savings—it could have a dramatic effect on your bottom line. In fact, the ATA has found that best-in-class truck fleets run 300% more miles between breakdowns than average fleets. How can you avoid breakdowns? With the AI solutions that represent the future of telematics.

AI and the Future of Telematics

With AI, you can use integrated telematics and diagnostic data to monitor the health of your entire fleet in real time. AI can compare the current performance of a vehicle component to its historical performance so that your fleet managers can see how likely a failure is and perform maintenance before it happens. Because you get real-time reports on vehicle conditions, you can intervene in a timely fashion. And because you can easily view vehicle health risk across your entire fleet, you can make better decisions about prioritizing maintenance on all your vehicles.

If you’re a Geotab customer, you can step up your AI game by taking advantage of five new insights in the Active Insights feature within MyGeotab 7.0:

  • Collision Detection: Help your fleet managers detect collisions and take measures to prevent future collisions—which will help keep more of your trucks on the road.
  • Water in Fuel: Get notified when water in a truck’s fuel could be impacting engine performance. This insight can help prevent roadside breakdowns.
  • Camshaft Position Sensor: Identify trucks that have malfunctioning camshaft position sensors—another common cause of breakdowns.
  • ABS: Let your fleet managers spot trucks with malfunctioning ABS so they can pull them off the road before there’s a breakdown—or an accident.
  • Exhaust Gas Regulator (EGR): Identify trucks that have malfunctioning EGR systems and perform maintenance before engine performance issues arise.

Embrace the Future of Telematics with Gridline

The future of telematics is here. AI solutions can help you stay one step ahead of fleet maintenance issues so that you can keep your trucks on the road, generating revenue. Give yourself an even greater advantage with Gridline Analytics—a solution that’s designed to help you uncover hidden patterns and correlations in your telematics data so that you can make smarter decisions about fleet maintenance.

We’d love to show you how. Please contact us today for a free demo.