Trucks and Technology

The big-3 in the domestic light-truck world (Ford, General Motors and Stellantis/Ram) are on a mission to earn your business, but selling trucks seems pretty-far down their priority list. The new sales approach treats the vehicle much like an ink-jet printer; the money to be made isn’t really in the sale of the product itself (though there is that), but through selling the consumables that the product requires. Just as Artificial Intelligence is the next great hope for business environments, subscription services for advanced telematics, productivity tracking or enabling optional features are all “products” now in automotive sales. In a retail purchase (any purchase somewhere up the food-chain from a base econobox), I am very sure your dealer’s F&I guy will set several of these options in front of you before you part ways. It’s all about continuity of revenue stream.

As a fleet buyer I can tell you unequivocally that fleets are not exempt from this pressure-cooker. In the past 3 years or so, all the fleet related new-model rollouts I’ve attended said very little about the actual truck (except maybe the redesigned grill, updated color options or the new all-season tires). What is discussed in depth is telematics, reporting capabilities and economies that can be found through connectivity…. Maybe, but let’s not forget the truck itself is still required to do an actual/physical job before any of that can make a difference, and that these jobs often require a variety of suspension options, configurable chassis and powertrains (where was that information, boys?).

In reality, car and truck manufacturers are very late to this game, so they have nothing new to offer, except maybe unlocking the optional features. If you are like me, you bristle at the concept of having to pay a subscription fee to have capability the vehicle already has turned on. Sounds sort of like a gangland protection racket scheme, and I thought we’d worked through that era and moved on, to say, insider trading and wire fraud. Guess not. Considering all the current legislative activity surrounding “right to repair” (another topic for another time), maybe the street gangster days are not over.

Complicating these telematics efforts is the fact that larger, multi-disciplined fleets also run more than one manufacturer’s equipment. In the fleet gigs I’ve worked for the past 37 years, we’ve run a variety of Ford, Dodge, Chevy, Hyundai, Nissan, Toyota, Lincoln/Mercury, GMC, Peterbuilt, Freightliner, Kenworth, International, Crane Carrier, Battle Motors, and sundry makes/models of off-road equipment, often all at the same time. Given that in fleet management you require diagnostic GPS reporting across your entire inventory, and that OE provided solutions are very brand specific, does it really make sense to get tied to a proprietary automotive telematics system? This can be done, and many OE’s can and will at least GPS locate other similar equipment with their systems, but they won’t provide the same level of analytics they do for their own vehicles.

So if you want full featured telematics, that would impose the necessity of multiple OE systems, and there is very little I personally enjoy more than managing multiple telematics databases; the more the merrier! (yes, sarcasm).  

Some 20 years ago I was the point-man assigned to deploy GPS across the entire road inventory for the utility that employed me. The system we chose pretty much offered everything that GPS providers offer now, and it was even ported real-time to our dispatch system (high-tech for the day). The front-end appearance of these systems then Vs now differs (some 20 years later), but the basic functionality remains the same. As an ecclesiastical writer once said “what has been will be again, there is nothing new under the sun” ...

Further considerations; the pay to play service that virtually every OE is currently hot to sell is semi-autonomous driving; Ford’s Blue Cruise, GM’s Super Cruise or Tesla’s full self-driving systems all vie for your attention (and each is “better” that the other somehow). With these you can presumably pay your monthly fee, sit back and enjoy the scenery while the vehicle does all the heavy lifting. While each day I get more enthusiastic about maybe taking the complication of driving away from garden-variety drivers, I’d really like to see how effective this autonomous technology is once tasked with actual chores. I want to see these vehicles plowing snow from streets, picking up trash, hauling 25-ton excavators from jobsite to jobsite or driving through hilly/trenched landfills to dump a load of spoils… in the rain. Now THERE’s an autonomous accomplishment!

Yep, some of that certainly sounds ridiculous, and right now it would stretch that technology to its breaking point, but these are the actual tasks of a vocational fleet, not merely driving non-stop on a major interstate for 2-5 hours at a stretch. That being the case, you need to ask yourself about the utility of OE’s trying to upsell current autonomous capabilities as somehow being actually valuable in fleet applications. In a nutshell, it appears that automotive manufacturers have gotten so intent on the alternate monetization scheme that they have lost sight of the ball in the sun… There goes another run-batted-in for team Fleet!