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Telematics important to EV fleets long after adoption stage, Geotab says
Date: 23 May 2022 | Author: Sean Keywood
Telematics systems can help fleets with electrification long after the initial adoption process has been completed, according to provider Geotab.
The firm's partner account manager Rick Nimbley, speaking to Business Car at the Fully Charged Live show, said that while the company was able to offer a comprehensive suitability assessment to tell fleets which of their vehicles could be electrified, data insights still had an important role to play once the new EVs hit the road.
He said: "A lot of fleets may believe 'We've transitioned to electric, that's it, we don't need anything else', but actually they still need that data and that insight.
"For example, in the past, if you had electric vehicles and you didn't connect them, you might have to send someone out to your 100 vehicles in a depot to check that they are charged, and then report back and say some can't go out as they aren't charged. Whereas now, if you connect all those vehicles, you can manage that whole thing, so you know in a single snapshot what is going on in your fleet, whereas previously you wouldn't have had that insight to drive those decisions at 7am on a Monday when you need your fleet out on the road."
Nimbley said that another area where telematics could help was with the deployment of charging infrastructure.
He said: "It could be a fleet manager has thought 'We need ten chargers at this depot'. They've plugged in Geotab, but already put the chargers in.
"By using Geotab's tools and ecosystem, that fleet manager can easily see whether those points are being used, are they getting the right value for money for those points, or actually is it that only two vehicles out of ten go to that depot, and they need to repurpose a couple of those chargers to depot A, depot B."
In addition, Nimbley said that increased tyre wear, linked to drivers not used to EVs, was another potential pitfall to watch out for.
He said: "When people go to EVs, you put your foot down in an EV you have all the torque immediately available to you, and people burn through tyres.
"It sounds like a simple example but people are burning through tyres because they haven't had the training to drive an EV.
"I would guarantee that, as a fleet manager, you bring in a lot of EVs then all of a sudden the maintenance costs are going up, because they are having to take them off the road to change the tyres."
