“If these cars could talk,” has probably been uttered by
more than one fleet manager charged with maintaining service schedules and
repairs for their company’s stable of automobiles. For companies from rental
agencies to limo services to organizations like the U.S. government, which
provides and maintains a vast number of automobiles for its employees, fleet
management is a major time and economic expense, and one with lots of room for
improvement. Of course, there are instruments like the odometer that let
managers know how far a vehicle has
been driven. But there’s really no way of knowing how a vehicle has been driven. Installing
telemetry monitors and loggers is a way of giving these cars a voice.
Aside from curbing drivers who treat a company car like
they’re on the track at Daytona, telemetry can also prove useful in other ways.
Predictive, preventative maintenance will be easier to schedule and recognize a
need for. Regular service like oil changes can be better monitored and
scheduled. What’s more, through trend analysis and location data, the best
service provider for a given vehicle at a given time, in a given location, can
now be accurately pinpointed and used. Things like repair times can also be
logged. Monitoring and data collection are infiltrating just about every
industry, a trend that Devar is pleased to be part of.
