Net zero, carbon footprint, reducing emissions – all key buzzwords that float around the automotive industry. Recent findings showed that companies are more likely to adopt sustainable initiatives focusing on these areas if they realise cost savings, revenue growth or efficiency improvements, in the near-term.  

This statement comes off the back of a recent report carried out by Geotab, a company specialising in connected vehicle and asset solutions.  Titled “Pragmatic Solutions for a Changing World”, Geotab’s 2024 sustainability and impact report highlights how the company increased deployment of its sustainability solutions by 39% last year. 

Alongside this, the number of EVs connected to Geotab telematics increased by 63% and travelled over 700 million miles (over 1 billion kilometres). 

The report also showcased the short-term financial gains that companies who implemented Geotab’s sustainable practices were able to achieve. 

We spoke to Edward Kulperger, senior vice president EMEA, Geotab, to learn more about the report and to discuss the financial and environmental savings that companies have achieved. 

Just Auto (JA): How do companies become involved with Geotab?

Edward Kulperger (EK): We look at what we call ‘customer life cycle management’, and from the time an organization goes through to the procurement of our technology and adopting it, we really focus on that. We like to say that we go on a journey with the customer. There are a couple of ways for an organisation to collect and process data. 

Number one, we do manufacture a device, our Geotab GO9 Device, that connects into a vehicle and transceives data from the  ECU, the so called “brains” of the vehicle. We process relevant fleet data, like VIN, odometer, fuel and energy in and out, maybe seat belt usage for last mile delivery vehicles, whether there’s high revving, so what the RPMs are, if there’s any malfunctions or maintenance issue within the vehicle. It is vehicle generated data that we collect from our device, and then we send that to the cloud. 

Another alternative, as OEMs are manufacturing their own telematics control unit on the assembly line in their vehicles, they’re sending data up to the cloud. Then we have a cloud-to-cloud integration with most OEMs on the planet today. We have a couple of outliers that we’re bringing in, but I believe over 80% of all OEMs on the planet today are integrated with Geotab.

We process that data in our cloud environment, and then make that data available to our customers in various reports, analytics that they can make use of. The OEMs are on a journey to move towards that software defined vehicle. Not all OEMs are at the same level with that journey, but they’re getting better. We think in years, maybe a decade, OEMs will be at the level where Geotab is currently in terms of the type of granular data that we get from our device, as we are helping them understand the type of signals and frequency that fleets desire.

JA: Could you highlight some of the key findings from the sustainability report?

EK: Our sustainability report really focused on the pragmatic application of our data. Rising costs and today’s economic realities demand a new approach to sustainability. I believe that the phrase: ‘storming, norming and performing’ analogy plays into sustainability and EV adoption. 

In the mid-term we believe that EVs will continue to be adopted, but there’s currently a lot of bumps along the road, and they’re being ironed out; things like incentives from government, infrastructure, and how to just generally operate EVs when you have a number of them in your fleet. 

In today’s economy, especially, there’s real focus on optimization. As companies adopt EVs, and if they can realize a cost savings or potential revenue growth, then it’ll encourage them to procure more EVs. 

California Freight is an organization with over 300 trucks, and they were able to reduce idling by approximately 60% and they were able to reduce idling costs by $50,000 per month by introducing idling reporting into their operations,

Another great example is the bus division of Deutsche Bahn, DB Regio. So, Deutsche Bahn is one of the largest commuting companies in the world. They leverage Geotab across their bus fleet, and reduced their emissions, their CO2 by 1400 metric tons by leveraging Geotab across many functions of their business. DB Regio estimates that total savings made since it adopted telematics with Geotab is approximately 25 million litres of diesel. When you look at the efficiency gain on this, if the average price of diesel were 1.65 euros, they would have saved approximately 41 million euros in fixed savings just by adopting Geotab telematics. 

We get rich, granular data across diesel and EVs that really impact bottom line. 

What challenges does net zero present?

We are probably quite an early adopter in terms of our initiatives as an organization that’s privately held without any outside investment; we’re able to control our own destiny, and this has helped. We jumped into signing up with The Climate Pledge early on, and producing our sustainability report early on, relative to most organizations.

We leverage scientific-based data within our own internal measurements; how a person travels, or commuting, we measure that. Also diversity and inclusion are very important to our organization, so all the social aspects. 

From the supply chain perspective, we have pushed what we want to see in our product down to our suppliers and component suppliers, and we think that that’s important to pass those best practices on. It makes us all better, and we believe we can have a much more profound effect downstream. 

When we collaborate with our customers to get them to their sustainability goals and net zero objectives, we think that that’s important.

I believe a recent report by the UK’s Confederation of British Industry (CBI), found that the net zero sector is growing three times faster than the overall UK economy. 

Our EVs that we connect grew by 63% last year. You can see that organizations are starting to procure EVs. If you look at the pool of EVs in our data lake, they travelled over 1 billion kilometres last year. You start to understand patterns, usage and range and some interesting elements. 

If we look across our fleet, and if they were to all transition to EVs, we envision a $4.9 billion in potential savings across the light duty vehicles, not looking at trucks which are on their earlier stage of that product life cycle. 

The users of the various sustainability reports that we have within our applications on average saved about 6.3% less CO2 per mile per mile compared to non-users, and that’s across 50 billion miles driven last year. That CO2 emission savings per mile of 6.3% is compelling.

We’re on the net zero mission and we have a goal to get to net zero by 2040, across all the scopes and I think that it’s important. 

Could you discuss the OEM group started by the company?

We created an OEM group approximately four years ago as we recognised that it was going to be to everyone’s advantage to start partnering instead of competing with OEMs. We hired the former CEO of Mercedes Benz connected services, Christoph Ludewig, now vice president EMEA at Geotab, to come in and help us shape that organisation. 

We have teams dedicated to working with OEMs to take them on their journey, so they look to us to understand what type of data a fleet company would need to run their business. We’ve helped shape standards and sit on the board of COVESA, which is a collaboration between Geotab and many of the OEMs, and some other tier-one automotive suppliers to help the OEMs on that journey. 

Today, we are partnered with over 80% of the world’s leading manufacturers. We’re working towards data parity by harmonising different data sets in the ecosystem to guarantee data quality across all brands and vehicle types. 

We collaborate tightly with the OEMs, we challenge them, we help influence their product roadmap. Then that type of data enables us to provide the analytics and reports that the largest fleet operators in the world need.  

I think that our OEM telematics expertise is based on about a decade of collaborating with the leading OEMs, and over 55,000 fleet customers globally. 

In Europe on the OEM side, we have 31 cloud to cloud integrations available, and as new Chinese automotive manufacturers are landing in Europe, they are contacting us to work with us to set up their cloud to cloud integration.

Could you discuss the work with Bosch?

When you look at an electric vehicle life cycle, we need to understand the residual value that these vehicles will have when they get sold or remarketed. We have an interesting program coming out on the Geotab Marketplace, where Bosch and Geotab have been collaborating on a battery in the cloud initiative. We’ll leverage real world data from Geotab over the life cycle of an EV battery. We’ll also leverage other data sets: What is the climate doing? What are the driving conditions doing? The charging: Are we fast charging? Are we depleting the battery to zero?

 

When you look at an electric vehicle life cycle, we need to understand the residual value that these vehicles will have when they get sold or remarketed.

We’ll take all these data sets, some deep artificial intelligence algorithms, neural networking via our data lake to understand patterns, and we’ll determine the battery health, which will complement or even steer the residual value of the EV. 

Then Bosch will provide a certificate, a relative score on that plus battery health, which we believe will help on the residual value. We think that’s a challenge in today’s environment, but we believe if we can help that side, then it helps an organization make that initial procurement into the EV world.

What do you see the future holding for automotive industry when looking at the environmental impact specifically? 

We work with organizations that have 100s of vehicles and they want to get better on their sustainability and optimisation journey, to organisations that have over 100,000 vehicles that operate some of the largest last mile delivery fleets in the world. For them adopting EVs is a challenge, and the environment that we live in today makes it tricky. 

It’s relatively expensive to purchase EVs upfront. The charging network is relatively underdeveloped in many areas; having that harmonized is a challenge, and that deters buyer programs. Incentive programs from governments have stagnated (depending upon where you are in the world); they’ve either been removed or are still going, but they have largely stagnated. 

We’ve seen, from a global perspective, that strict emission targets are still present, and we believe they will continue to evolve and geopolitical landscape aside, the fluctuating consumer interest in EVs has created financial and strategic challenges for the manufacturers.

Then we look at this from a fleet perspective; companies need to determine whether transitioning to EVs, and that total cost of ownership from the upfront capital expense, to operating those over weeks, months, years, will have that optimization or impact that they really need to see and plan for.

We’re trying to propagate that message. We see the savings that last mile delivery companies are making on their transition to EVs. There are not as many makes and models available in the commercial world versus consumer world but many last-mile-delivery companies and local courier companies are procuring 1,000s of electric vans for their deliverance. The Mercedes eVito, and E-sprinter, and the Ford E-Transit, for example, we’re seeing some significant take up of those in our environment. 

I like to use the ‘pilot, nail-it, then scale-it’ philosophy. On the EV side we are entering the nail-it phase, and as more norming happens around understanding the total cost of savings of operating these vehicles optimally, we’ll start entering that scale-it phase. The trucks are in the pilot phase, then I believe that’ll be nailed in due course.