Vehicle Telematics Features: How to Maximize the Data

Telematics systems are widely recognized in the fleet industry as a powerful technology capable of improving fleet performance, lowering fuel and operational costs, increasing driver safety, and much more. Next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies are now gaining traction and becoming equally familiar and desirable among fleet enterprises.

While telematics technology can certainly help businesses to operate more efficiently and competitively, what’s becoming increasingly clear is how AI-powered software can enhance telematics features and maximize the use of fleet telematics data.

This article will briefly overview vehicle telematics systems and highlight the most important features to consider when purchasing one. We will also discuss why businesses often benefit with more than just a telematics platform, emphasizing how AI technology augments and improves vehicle telematics systems by elevating telematics data to higher accuracy, visibility, and efficiency levels.

What is Vehicle Telematics?

The term "vehicle telematics" refers to the remote monitoring of vehicle assets and drivers using telematics and GPS technology. Vehicle telematics systems collect valuable information about a company's mobile assets and provide vital information about fleet drivers and their driving behavior to fleet managers and company stakeholders.

Vehicle telematics systems can collect telematics data from technology installed inside vehicles (OBD telematics) or from mobile devices and tablets (mobile telematics systems). This technology can provide information about your vehicles and equipment regarding speed, acceleration, fuel consumption, location, performance, and more.

The Benefits of Vehicle Telematics Systems

There are numerous well-known advantages to using a vehicle telematics system. These systems give fleet managers more visibility of, and information about, their company's assets and drivers. With good telematics data surfacing valuable, actionable data fleets can improve fleet safety, be provided information about vehicle health and maintenance, and provide great insight into driver behavior and performance.

However, before purchasing a vehicle telematics system, you must understand which features are essential to your company to maximize efficiency and drive financial benefit versus those which are negotiable. It is also important to understand that vehicle telematics systems can be paired with AI-powered fleet management software to take the technology far beyond its basic location tracking and GPS features ultimately optimizing the telematics benefits.

The most effective telematics systems should incorporate AI and machine learning with automated workflows capable of extracting valuable insights from large volumes of telematics data and incorporating those actionable insights into your daily operations in real time.

Improve Vehicle Telematics Features with AI Technology

AI and machine learning have the potential to significantly improve fleet management and propel the industry to new heights of efficiency and performance. This advanced technology is known for evaluating large amounts of data, extracting insights that would otherwise be difficult for the human eye to notice and understand while simplifying big data and learning from it over time.

The technology can minimize company risks, cut costs, and alert fleet managers and drivers to issues before they lead to unfortunate outcomes when utilized with automation. AI is more proactive than traditional telematics reporting that is reactive. In an industry that relies on collecting large amounts of telematics data and human interpretation of this data, which is a frequently time-consuming and inefficient process, AI and machine technology can prove to be extremely useful for several reasons. 

In the sections below, we'll discuss the main advantages of AI and machine learning technology and explore how they can enhance vehicle telematics features and maximize collected data.

1. Advanced Analytics & Automation

Tourmo AI uses data, algorithms, statistics, and machine learning to surface exceptions and information to the right people at the right time before the issues become persistent problems. Areas of benefit driven from a powerful AI engine include identifying good and poor driver behavior, identification of opportunities to improve fuel costs, safety risks, predictive maintenance, and more. Unprecedented value is provided by the ability to uncover and clearly communicate hidden patterns, learn from data (machine learning), and gain important insight from large volumes of data.

When combined with automation, advanced analytics can reduce a company’s reliance on human analysis of large amounts of vehicle telematics data and improve how it responds to real-time challenges. For example, Tourmo AI alerts drivers when risky driving behavior has been identified and suggests self-corrective action without needing supervisor intervention; this process can help mitigate driver safety risks immediately. 

Our fleet management system utilizes automation and AI together to transform insights from AI into actionable tasks. Suppose your current vehicle telematics features require a large amount of human oversight and manual intervention. In that case, you can use our advanced technology to curb risky driver behavior, incorporate driver coaching and feedback, predict risk in your route plans, and help resolve safety concerns before they turn into costly errors.

2. Contextualized Driving Behavior Analysis

AI technology has the potential to use vehicle telematics data to support more accurate and intelligent decision-making. Tourmo AI, an AI-powered technology with machine learning capabilities, can reveal valuable insights into your telematics data. These insights can improve driver behavior and performance, improve safety and compliance levels, and even help to predict maintenance issues.

Tourmo AI provides a patented approach to contextualized driver behavior analysis. The contextualization further increments traditional telematics as it evaluates events and performance in the context of specific and situational conditions such as weather, traffic, geography, and population to name a few. This contextualization highlights good and underperforming driver behavior to levels traditional telematics cannot come close to achieving on an event only basis. Our system will help you understand the context of events to determine if a driver's behavior is out of the ordinary and riskier than other drivers in similar vehicles, areas, and conditions while reducing false positives.

If you’re having trouble or believe you have gone as far as you can with monitoring or managing driver behavior with your system’s current vehicle telematics features, Tourmo can help. Correlations from Tourmo AI can alert personnel of issues when they arise, allowing them to self-correct, mitigate risk immediately, and even predict future outcomes. It will deliver valuable insights to all employees, improve organizational transparency, and help integrate essential data into your everyday workflows.

3. Sustainability

Artificial intelligence and machine learning technology can have a significant impact on your company's sustainability goals. If your current vehicle telematics features don't provide a high level of visibility into your company's fuel efficiency and CO2 emissions, you should consider the costs and incorporate advanced AI-powered fleet management software into your current tech stack.

Tourmo AI can improve your current fuel mitigation strategy by monitoring your fleet's fuel efficiency, performance, and environmental impact. It will help you detect and prevent fuel theft and accurately report your fleet fuel use and CO2 footprint to the government.

Tourmo's AI-powered platform will teach your drivers how to use less fuel. When our system detects driving behaviors that increase fuel consumption, it will recommend the best course of action. It will also automatically reconcile fuel transactions while detecting potential fuel theft. Our system includes a gamification and rewards system to encourage driver participation.

4. Enhanced Video Features

Traditional vehicle telematics features benefit from AI and machine learning in terms of accuracy and objectivity. Time-consuming and repetitive review tasks that rely on fleet manager oversight can be exhausting and increase the possibility of human error. This can also raise a company's overall liability risk.

Another advantage of using AI technology is its ability to respond quickly and consistently to safety incidents. Tourmo AI can process video footage in real time, eliminating the need for human intervention.

If your current vehicle telematics features leave you struggling to incorporate video footage into your operations, Tourmo’s AI-powered platform can help you streamline and optimize the process. Our system will help you capture the right events at the right times, access and share them with company stakeholders, and use insights to respond in ways that protect your company, team, and company.

Tourmo AI — Video Operations Solution

If your current vehicle telematics features, such as dashcams, require you to sift through hours of footage and struggle to obtain data from an event, Tourmo AI can help you increase ROI from existing fleet management video analytics while reducing false positives, technician calls, and manual overhead.

Tourmo Video Operations solution includes a fully integrated business intelligence suite to help you incorporate video into your operations. We can help you manage multi-camera complexity and custom video triggers with ease. Our platform provides complete visibility into video-enabled workflows specific to your business, as well as quick and easy access to all videos with the ability to share them with customers and third parties.

We know camera systems can be expensive when you factor in the hardware, installation, and vehicle downtime. Instead of replacing them, we can work with your existing cameras to extend the capabilities, so you get the most out of your investment. 

Our Video Operations solution includes features such as:

• Accuracy-boosting data reprocessing
• AI-Powered false positive reduction
• Contextualized event evaluation
• Accurate camera health analysis
• Partner service verification portal

Partner With Tourmo — Improved Vehicle Telematics Features

A vehicle telematics system can provide a variety of valuable features that can help improve your company's performance, cut costs, and increase safety. However, many current systems on the market lack critical features and rely heavily on manual oversight and intervention. The manual processes in managing telematics systems and large amounts of collected data can be a severe barrier to quick corrective action.

If you’re having trouble getting the value out of your current system or lack a vehicle telematics system, Tourmo would be a great partner for you. Tourmo’s AI-powered platform can process mobility data from any smartphone, tablet, or telematics device, regardless of the vehicle or the location, enabling users to monitor, control, and address fleet operations issues immediately.