Ford to Launch New Data-monitoring Services for Vehicle Fleets

Ford will be shortly launching two new connectivity solutions which are meant for fleet use to the market. Both of them perform the function of keeping tabs on vehicle data and reporting to the fleet managers, the difference lies in the kind of vehicles they are used for. While one of them is meant for law enforcement fleets which are mainly made up of Ford vehicles in the United States, the other solution is for commercial vehicle operators.

Both these factory-provided systems leverage the vehicles’ built-in modem to transfer data to Ford’s Transportation Mobility Cloud. This cloud has been specially designed for Ford by a Silicon Valley based startup, Autonomic. Ford has ambitious plans to expand connectivity to all its products by 2019, and is beginning by rolling out these services for vehicles used in fleets.

Ford’s Data Services provides fleet operators with information pertaining to details like mileage, vehicle health, GPS location, fuel usage, and driver behavior. All these details are highly important for a commercial fleet. The product which is to be used for commercial fleets has additional features which builds on top of the Data Services system and offer additional details regarding fuel use, vehicle emissions and health as well as seatbelt usage. There is also an option to retrofit systems on vehicles as old as the 2012 model year, with the use of a Ford plug-in device.

Ford has teamed up with Verizon which will serve as a telematics service operator, and will shortly add Geotab and Spireon to the list of partners.

Commenting on the development, Ford Commercial Solutions CEO Lee Jelenic said that business owners and operators would rather spend time serving their customers than spending a lot of time on managing their fleets. Ford’s goal was to help them unlock the data from their vehicles so that they could benefit from more effective ways to manage their fleets and thus improve their operations.

Jelenic concluded by saying that the company’s new products were tailored to catered to the needs of fleets of all types ranging from those run by law enforcement to operators of large multi-brand fleets who need more insight regarding their Ford vehicles.