The Final Frontier

The benefits of fitting vehicles with telematics have been slow to catch on in the Middle East but interest has been accelerating ever since the UAE decided to rationalise fuel prices in 2015. Fuel is likely to make up a gradually more significant component of the operating cost of a truck fleet and that has woken operators up to the fact that telematics can prevent those costs from spiraling out of control.

Telematics is data, pure and simple. A system is installed in the vehicle which transmits through GPRS to the operator, allowing them to know what the vehicle is doing, where it is located, the vehicle’s condition and the driver’s behavior. But it’s the use of that data that is the key to unlocking the environmental and fuel consumption benefits that telematics can bring.

“If you use telematics correctly, you know every time a driver presses the break peddle, if he presses the breaks too hard, if he steers erratically or if he’s speeding,” says Dr Richard Brown, Head of After Sales & Product Management, MAN Truck & Bus Middle East and Africa. “The data is all there. Initially the main purpose is to train the operator to use the data that’s been provided, and when they’re trained and understand the system they will see the gaps in the driver’s knowledge that we can then focus on to train them to drive better. You can optimise routing, tire wear and load all through the understanding of the information provided.”

Cost benefits

Telematics has been widely used among fleet operators in Europe for around 15 years. Unsurprisingly, the Middle East is one of the last region’s to introduce it but the market has really begun to hot up in the last two years.

“Every manufacturer is representing their own telematics offering to the market,” says Brown. “The uptake in the Middle East has certainly increased in the last 20 month where there’s a mind shift towards fuel consumption with the fuel prices changing. Two years ago, when we started talking to end users about telematics for the Middle East, the attitude was very much ‘fuel cost is not worth thinking about’.”

Most manufacturers will now offer a telematics package with a new vehicle. Clients have the option of doing without or choosing from a range of packages from basic vehicle tracking to a far more complex system that provides all sorts of data. Systems can also be retrofitted and there are many third parties in the market offering their services too.

There is, of course, an initial cost to install a telematics system and there’s an operating cost for the data transfer, however savings can quickly outweigh those costs. “From a business case that we’ve done with one operator, the telematics pays for itself in nine months through fuel savings in this region,” says Dr Brown. “That’s for both long distance vehicles and construction.”

You might think that telematics might only be used for long distance vehicles but that isn’t the case.

“I’ve had a lot of meetings in the last year and I was surprised how many construction machines are delivered from factory with telematics installed as standard” says Dr Brown. “It records vehicle health, operating hours, similar things to what we do with vehicles. It’s also used for preventive maintenance. The system we provide can tell the user if the vehicle has enough kilometres to do the run that he wants before its next due service. If not, he can send it for service straight away and that reduces downtime.”

The next generation of data capture will even predict component change requirements so the system can inform the owner that the vehicle needs to go to the workshop.

Driver Training

Telematics systems allow operators to provide their drivers with focused training. They can detect everything from improper gear shifting to excessive use of breaks, not using cruise control, not using the correct gear for the speed, excessive acceleration and using the break and accelerator at the same time. All of these things have a negative impact on fuel efficiency.

MAN’s telematics system produces a driver scorecard rating them from A (the best) to G (problem driver). The cost savings, not to mention safety improvements, that can be made from improving a driver’s skills are significant.

“Normally we find drivers in the Middle East to be C-D category,” says Dr Brown. “If we train them from a D to a C we reduce cost of ownership by between three and five percent. If we train them from a D to an A that increases considerably above 10 percent. The data that you get back focuses the driver training.”

Around 80 percent of fuel consumption saving comes from the driver but the remaining 20 percent comes from the operator or the fleet manager making sure the driver is going to the correct destination via the shortest route possible.

Safety

Safety works in the same way. Harsh steering and harsh breaking are the two focus points for improving safe driving. And though it hasn’t been done yet in the Middle East there is even the option to fit vehicles with forward and rear facing external and internal cameras to monitor the driver as well as road conditions, making it easier to determine the cause of an accident right away.

“We’ve got one video of an incident that happened in the UK between a truck and a motorbike,” Dr Brown says. “The truck driver was sent to court but they played the video and the case was thrown out because it wasn’t his fault, it was the biker’s fault.”

There is greater and greater emphasis being placed on road safety in this region, especially in the UAE where the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) is now planning to make it mandatory for all vehicles over 12 tonnes to have telematics systems, which will allow them to monitor every commercial vehicle on the road in real time. So does this provide opportunities for providers to retrofit existing vehicles with telematics systems?

“We can retrofit and we can fit systems to almost any make of vehicle but we haven’t seen the full scope of the requirement yet from the RTA,” says Dr Brown. “If there’s a requirement that we haven’t engineered yet then we’d have to do some development. But if there’s one government body that’s starting to think that telematics can assist them in policing road safety, hopefully that’s the seed that starts to grow and spreads throughout the GCC. Dubai seems to be one step ahead of the rest of the region.”

Despite its relatively recent introduction, uptake of telematics systems among fleet operators in this region has been swift and they are hungry for more.

“Our initial intention in November last year was to introduce the simple system to this region, just to start the operators understanding what to do with the data,” says Dr Brown. “But by January we’d already reached where we thought we’d be in July by introducing additional modules. We’re now at the fourth module and we didn’t expect to be there until next year. The end users are asking us for more. At the moment our full package has seven modules but it’s always in development.”

Emissions

From an emissions point of view, it’s fair to say standards in the Gulf still lag someway behind Europe and elsewhere. Current legislation is a GSO (Gulf Standards Organisation) regulation from 1986. But on July 1, 2017 all GCC countries will introduce a mandatory EURO 3 standard for all newly registered vehicles. That’s a quantum leap from where we are now which is around EURO 1.5. It’s clearly a big step in the right direction and will produce a significant reduction in emissions but Europe is now at EURO 6 so there is still a considerable gap.

“Today, only the UAE could introduce a EURO norm higher than five because of the fuel quality which is as good as anywhere in Europe,” Dr Brown says. “But in general the cost of implementation of a higher EURO norm is huge because you’d have to change the quality of fuel and the vehicle technology is also totally different. The cost of the components is a lot higher so the initial cost of purchase is a lot higher and the Middle East has not reached a point where it will accept vehicles that cost significantly more.”

However Dr Brown says he expects the region to move up the gears to higher EURO standards far quicker than happened in Europe. “They don’t intend to allow high polluting vehicles on the road much longer.”