One-to-one with David Savage, Geotab

would call our strategic partners, who are blue chip household brands, for example the likes of Renault and Mercedes-Benz. Then we have our value added resellers who are typically smaller businesses selling into smaller sized opportunities, again relationship led.

How do you compete against OEMs who offer their own telematics solutions?

You’re correct that OEMs are trying to monetise their own data. We work with probably a majority of the OEMs within the European market. And yes, there was reticence from them a few years ago to really work with a third party telematics company. But customer needs have driven greater collaboration between OEMs and ourselves. The key driver behind that has been the data. So typically our device will plug in to a vehicle’s OBD2 port and provide very rich data (obviously with EVs there is no OBD2 port so it’s a different set-up). That’s not data that the OEMs necessarily can access or can share at the moment.

So I think on the OEM side of it, it is improving, but if you’re a fleet manager sat in your office anywhere in the world, you want a single pane of glass. You want that single view of all the different makes and models you might have, from your light commercial vehicles to your pool cars to your trucks. And if you were to do it on an OEM level, if you’ve got three or four OEMs you work with, you need three or four different platforms. So you cannot work like for like. That’s where we see ourselves now, and becoming more integral in the future - as being the platform for all of that data to come in to to provide the fleet manager with that single pane of glass.

Have the attitudes of fleet managers changed in recent years in relation to telematics?

I think it’s evolved greatly. There’s been a real shift to digitalisation over the last half a decade or even before that. What we’ve done at Geotab is really show the value that the insights from data can derive for a company to address whatever their challenges may be, whether sustainability, reducing carbon footprints, tailpipe emissions, driver safety efficiency, etc.

How can telematics help fleets looking to move to electric vehicles?

The view of Geotab is that you cannot transition [from an ICE fleet to electric] without telematics data. What telematics data does is really help inform where you are. The extraction of data can help you understand usage patterns from your current vehicles, the current range they are doing, the impact of weather, etc. By looking at some of those key requirements we have a tool called the Electric Vehicle Suitability Assessment. That can take the data from those internal combustion vehicles and do a benchmarking exercise with electric vehicles that exist in the market to allow a fleet manger or company to say ’I can transition x vehicles to electric vehicles on a like-for-like basis.

And then, once those vehicle have transitioned, the data points change when you are looking at electric vehicles. So if you’re a fleet manager you’re going to be looking at what’s the current state of charge, if that vehicle is going to be able to complete its scheduled delivery pattern for the day. You also want to be looking at the driver inputs and how they impact on the range.

I think transition is an important word when you are looking at the move towards electrification. You can’t make knee-jerk decisions. It has to be a phased approach. You have to accept that maybe there’s not going to be an electric vehicle that’s going to do what you need it to do just now. Don’t be rushed into a transition would be my advice to a fleet manager. Telematics data is really going to help you mitigate the risk in decision making but if the data is telling you that a transition plan should take five years, don’t try and rush it in three years. because the cost could be prohibitive. So trust the data.

With Cathal Doyle - cathal@fleet.ie