How data is revolutionising Motor Fleets: An interview with GEOTAB

Data is playing a pivotal role in evolving all aspects of life, including how we move. “Probably by 2030 about 80% of the vehicles on the road will be connected and providing data at the OEM level” — but what will this mean?

To find out more about the impact of data on the world of mobility, we spoke to the world’s largest telematics company, GEOTAB, who process over 40 billion connected vehicle data points every day.

Aaron Jarvis tells us how this data is changing the world of transportation and making the world a safer and smarter place. Read on for the full transcript or watch the full interview below.

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Who are GEOTAB?

GEOTAB is one of the leading connected car platforms in the world. We have about 2.5 million vehicles connected today processing about 40 billion data points, and we try to provide products and services that allow people that own vehicles to manage them better.

How does GEOTAB’s technology help fleets?

We try to be the centre of the connected car ecosystem, so we’re really trying to enable people that are interested in the data from vehicles, to one, get that data, and two, put it in one place so that everybody can access it.

From a vehicle owner or vehicle managers point of view, we’re trying to provide insight to help them manage their fleet of vehicles, so that could be a large FMC who might need to reduce their operational expenditure by having data from the vehicle, or it could be a fleet manager of a large fleet or a small fleet, who wants to make sure the drivers are wearing their seatbelts and are safe, or that they’re reducing their carbon footprint by reducing things like idling or maybe they need to transition to electric vehicles so they need help choosing which vehicle to change to.

What trends are your data showing around the world?

The main trend that I’m sure everyone is seeing is that fleets are really interested in decarbonisation and what that means in 2021, is that fleets need to move to electric vehicles.

So really the trend in data is that one, people are looking at the data more because they want to understand which vehicles they can transition to electric, and two, they’re needing to look at data from electric vehicles in a lot of detail, so, that could be to help them operate electric if they’re a company with lots of electric milk floats, they need to make sure that those vehicles are charged or a big delivery company and they need to know that ‘James’ has enough battery to make all of his deliveries tomorrow. Or it could be that they’re trying to insure their electric vehicles and actually need some contextual insurance based on the behaviour specifically as an electric vehicle.

So I guess I’d say, in summary, the trend in the data is that people are paying more attention to it today, it’s much more valuable than it’s ever been before.

GEOTAB spoke at COP26, can you tell us more about that?

We were present on two panels of COP26. The first with our CEO speaking with Amazon and they’ve just released a climate pledge which GEOTAB’s part of, and that pledge essentially is to be 10 years ahead of the Paris agreement in terms of reaching carbon neutral as a business. And so, they’re inviting people to do that, and importantly, for us with Amazon, we’re connecting their vehicles and we’re actively helping them meet their own goals of reducing carbon. So we’re helping them to manage the vehicle more efficiently and bring the carbon down, and then, more importantly, helping them choose which vehicles they have today on the road that could transition to electric.

Beyond telematics, what other things are you really excited about in mobility?

I think that shared access to vehicles is really exciting. Ultimately, there’s a lot of apprehension in the world about automation. But my view is that moving into mobility being connected allows a lot of good automation and can refocus people longer on more productive and exciting tasks.

I think flying cars would be great, and also, Elon Musk drilling holes in the ground and putting roads under there and automated cars are also really interesting, I think coming. A bit closer to home we obviously have the connected and autonomous vehicle which again is predicated on great data in cars.

How will connected vehicle data applications develop over time?

Probably by 2030 about 80% of the vehicles on the road will be connected and providing data at the OEM level. Our customers are now taking lots of data from the vehicle, fault codes and how we can predict that fault codes are going to happen and therefore fix the vehicle before there are problems.

Making sure that we have all the data we need from around the rest of the ecosystem, so that might be integrating charge-point providers to make sure that the customers can manage the load of the infrastructure on their site, as well as connecting with the wider ecosystem around the vehicle, we want to add better insight about the vehicle itself.

Managing the degradation of the battery is a really important step forward where GEOTAB can help where not many other businesses have that level of data about the day-to-day performance of the battery that can inform the next 5, 10 or 15 years.

Why did GEOTAB choose to partner with Flock?

We’ve spoken a lot today about the insights that you can draw from data, and I think Flock are really on the forefront of taking data from vehicles and supporting the people generating that data by using it as context, GEOTAB and Flock work well together because we’re able to support Flock by giving lots of information about the vehicle, and for us at GEOTAB, Flock are on the forefront of doing that because you’re creating contextual risk models there, and we’re really looking forward to helping you create those types of models around the vehicle, whether that’s an electric vehicle that has completely different driving behaviours or patterns of behaviour within the vehicle that can help you predict risk and ultimately price insurance, more accurately, for the end customer.

Are you looking for intelligent fleet motor insurance? Visit our website or Broker page and see why companies like Jaguar Land Rover and Virtuo are insuring their fleets with Flock.