Automotive Telematics Newsgroup
Update July 2003
The big issue dominating the industry today is the proliferation of patents being awarded for what have previously been considered generic applications. It is the American players which are leading the charge - USA technology has gained a stack of rights over the past year or so, and Trimble has just registered its fiftieth (!) affiliated patent for location-based services. All of which can have a serious impact on the way that telematics develops; rather than being able to simply develop a product or service, companies will now have to write into their budgets provision for possible royalty payments. And if they fail to agree and are subsequently found to have infringed somebody else's patent, then the ramifications could more severe, and put the infringer out of business. All of which suggests that the need for some kind of global affiliation, which would ensure common operating procedures, becomes more imperative.
Meanwhile, the anticipated adoption of original equipment systems fitted to vehicles seems to be slipping behind schedule; back in the late 1990s various major players such as Motorola, Siemens and Bosch were suggesting that by 2003 there would be widespread adoption, with many embedded (tech-talk for factory fitted) systems in use, and control centres popping up in every country. But the reality is that only a handful of vehicles are telematics-ready, and the majority of those are concentrating on providing drivers with navigation systems, rather than added-value location-based services.
Similarly, the trucking industry, whilst aware of the benefits of telematics as the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of integrated fleet management systems, are still not adopting it on a wholesale scale. It seems from a recent conference I attended that the biggest problem is that fleet managers are just too busy doing their existing jobs to take time off to learn about, and then adopt, the use of location-based services. The wider issue of 'duty of care' and how it can relate to correspondingly wider charges of corporate manslaughter as a criminal case when an employee is killed whilst working, ought to be fuelling the use of telematics, but isn't. Maybe the answer is to make the sales pitch less complex - and also for telematics service providers to recognise that virtually the world over the truck industry operates on a leasing basis, and that they are reluctant to spend capital on installing in-vehicle and back office systems.
Then there's the matter of road tolls. It seems that every country has its own favoured method of extracting money from road and crossing users; everybody wants collection to be handled remotely (without the need to pay in cash at toll booths, which creates traffic jams) but nobody can agree on a common method of achieving this. This strikes me as another example of the difference between the telematics and telecoms industries; mobile telephone service providers seem able to operate seamlessly across the world, and the basic billing technology employed should not be far away from that required by the various national road tolling systems, All that now needs to be done is to agree on a common vehicle/place recognition system (so that a single unit can be used at any toll point) and for one of the billing systems specialists to step in with a solution and we can all rest happily. Somehow I cannot see it, because that would rely on the American and French governments agreeing on something...
Dennis Foy
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Automotive Telematics
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