Vehicle data: It’s important to formulate strategy

By Edward Kulperger, Geotab's vice president Europe 

Around the world, there are millions of connected vehicles in operation, including mega fleets, government service vehicles and small/medium fleets across a wide spectrum of industries.

Modern transportation and mobility without data insights has become unthinkable. Every transportation company must have, or must consider creating, a digital transformation team. 

At a recent British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA) event, I presented data insights which fleet vehicles provide.

With more than 750,000 connected vehicles, these real world insights were safety focused and paramount to the future health and safety of our communities. 

Beyond safety, these insights provide information to assist communities, ensuring our roads are less congested and safer while minimising fuel use and emissions.

However, access to mobility and fleet insights cannot be taken for granted.

It is important to understand the nature of access to vehicle data, remain aware of the threats and formulate a strategy to preserve these and future insights.

Dirk Schlimm at Geotab has articulated some bedrock principles for fleets to ensure future competitiveness: 

■ Access to real time data is essential to remain relevant.

■ Vehicle owners must state their expectation to have access and control of their operational data.

■ Interoperability is key to enable direct, real-time access to data (via the OBD port).

■ Ensure utilisation of a telematics platform which offers high data quality, variety and availability.

■ Security is the foundation of data access and connected mobility.

■ Mobility solutions must consider driver privacy.

Fleet data insights are important to ensure safety, open and fair competition and innovation, including connection to a host of B2B services, financial services, smart city infrastructure, and new mobility strategies such as car sharing

In all use cases, driver privacy must be considered. Industry and government must evolve privacy policies that conform to laws and good privacy practice.

The digital transformation is upon us.