Top trends for the fleet industry in 2020

The fleet industry is constantly growing and changing, thanks to continual advances in technology. With so many technological changes happening, it’s important to keep up with the industry’s latest and biggest trends to maximise the efficiency of your fleet.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of the biggest fleet industry trends to look out for in 2020:

Increased focus on efficiency

Since technology is becoming more and more accessible to fleet organisations, managers are able to clearly see the value of data and understand how leveraging it can improve efficiencies within their fleet.

For example, using telematics gives you full visibility of commonly travelled routes, combined with average journey times and speeds. This allows you to analyse vehicle usage and provide feedback to drivers with a view to reducing wasted journeys. This also improves customer service, as it helps your fleet drivers to meet the expectations of their customers as efficiently as possible.

Due to the rapid increase in online shopping, perfecting last-mile delivery logistics has become more and more challenging. Online shoppers want the convenience of fast, free delivery, and this puts pressure on fleet companies to compete for the very best delivery service. With 84% of customers claiming they wouldn’t return to a brand that missed their delivery window, it’s more important than ever to offer a fast and efficient service.

With the net zero carbon target to be hit by 2050, there is also increasing pressure for fleet companies to improve their environmental credentials and reduce carbon emissions. What’s more, low emission zones are costly for fleet vehicles. Using telematics helps drivers to take the shortest routes possible in order to reduce emissions whilst also avoiding high costs.

Using telematics can also help to reduce and prevent breakdowns through proactive maintenance. Because they’re not using their personal car, drivers don’t always report when an issue has occurred with their vehicle, such as a warning light coming on, particularly when vehicles are shared between multiple drivers. Telematics provide actionable care and maintenance insights and service alerts, so that no issue goes unnoticed.

Technology is constantly improving, and for fleet managers, having the means to gather data regardless of where your vehicles are is a huge game-changer.

Adopting new processes is always daunting for businesses, but strong fleet technology is easy to implement and highly intuitive. As more and more fleet operators begin to harness the strength of telematics, they’ll experience stronger efficiency within their company processes.

Increased adoption of vehicle tracking and telematics

Telematics provide a way for fleet managers to receive real-time updates about their fleet, thus alerting them to any issues immediately so that action can be taken. Updates include:

• Odometer readings
• Driver behaviour alerts
• Diagnostic trouble codes
• Vehicle performance data

Whilst many fleet managers are embracing telematics tools to track their vehicles, not all companies are leveraging the data produced by telematics to its full potential. However, as they continue to embrace data to improve fleets, telematics is likely to remain a core focus for the industry.

Using telematics helps to improve the efficiency of your fleet because it allows you to track data trends across all of your vehicles and how they are used by your drivers in terms of journey time and average speed.

Telematics also helps to reduce insurance costs, as you can calculate premiums through telematics data. By monitoring and improving driver behaviour, you can reduce your fleet’s accident rate and ensure insurance rates remain as low as possible.

More focus on data security

Thanks to the increased use of telematics, fleets are sitting on more data than ever before. Using tools like electronic logging and GPS devices has significantly improved the way fleet managers obtain data about their vehicles and those driving them. Telematics and other devices allow managers to get a detailed snapshot of their fleet’s performance, safety and health

These tools are also a huge improvement on paper-based processes and guesswork, but it’s worth noting that electronic data can be vulnerable.

This means that fleet managers have a responsibility to ensure the privacy and security of their data. Taking measures to keep sensitive information secure will provide peace of mind and reduce any risk of data breaches.

As a starting point, we recommend fleet managers speak to their telematics partners about the techniques and controls they use to prevent unauthorised access to customer data, their policies around data protection laws such as GDPR, and the control they offer over data retrieval and retention.

More focus on protecting vehicles against theft

Vehicle theft has increased by 50% over the last five years, reaching an eight-year high in 2019.

These statistics are shocking, so it’s no surprise that there’s more pressure on fleet managers to protect their vehicles from theft.

Combining intelligent software, dashcam devices and connected telematics allows fleet managers to get alerts in the event of high risk, erratic driving behaviour or vehicles being driven in unusual locations. This means that, if any of your vehicles are stolen, you will be able to recover them quickly, reducing the potential cost of replacements.

However, there is a caveat that thieves are getting savvier when it comes to finding and removing most common telematics devices. This means that fleet managers should look at the specific covert options for the best possible chances of preventing vehicle theft.