Many fleet managers will be familiar with the capabilities of telematics systems even if they do not use them. A system could enable data transfer between a vehicle and a fleet manager or the vehicle’s operating base to give information on location, speed of travel and driving style, among many other factors.

For commercial vehicles, a system could also give information on a range of factors from refrigerated body temperature, estimated time of delivery and by interfacing with a routeing and scheduling package, could automatically arrange a delivery schedule or help to allocate the next available vehicle to a job.

In other words, a telematics system could provide a great deal of data that could help a fleet to run more efficiently, by identifying drivers who might need further training and reducing mileage by sending the right driver to the next job, while also giving fleet managers visibility of their fleet.

This has been the basic offering from telematics systems up to now. How could it be developed further? ALD Automotive has been developing its own ideas and recently announced a pilot project using telematics at the heart of its ALDO Smart Mobility Assistant system.

Although the company operates a fleet of some 930,000 vehicles in 37 countries, ALDO is not designed solely for use with its vehicle fleet, as Tim Albertsen, ALD International’s Deputy CEO explained, “There has been a lot of discussion about multi-modality, new mobility, car sharing etc for the last 2 or 3 years. I think we are basically now at a time where things are starting to happen – not on a large scale, but at least the first real products are going on the road and the first experiences from the client are coming in.

“We have a strategy group internally, which works with trying to figure out how to serve our corporate clients better in the future and how our products will evolve over time. Some of the mega-trends that are very clear these days have meant we have developed 4 scenarios that we are working on. The two main axes that we have identified for our business and for corporate mobility are the level of connectivity – we see that people are more and more connected and we also see regulation impacting quite heavily particularly due to a lot of different things – CO2 emissions, congestion, scarce resources.”

Tim says that ALD Automotive has basically split its business into two for the future to deal with these issues. “Transport for rural areas – meaning outside the cities and cars that are being used for a purpose – we see that continuing much as we know it today. If people live outside cities they will still need a car for many years to come. So we don’t see our products and services evolving so much around that. Where we see things evolving quite quickly is in the big cities – again that’s due to regulation. There’s quite an interesting development in terms of products and services and clients are asking for a different form of mobility, no doubt.

“Then as we want to be quite operational with products and services and the most operational ideas for these things never come out of the headquarters of holding companies, we have basically placed a lot of the development around products and services with our subsidiaries.”

Greater flexibility seems to be the requirement for products. For instance ALD recently launched ALD switch in the Benelux countries. If for instance a driver has an allowance of €1,000 per month for a car, he or she could choose to spend €700 per month by downsizing to a smaller car, then using the balance to choose a different car for when it is needed. For example, this could be for a cabriolet on a summer weekend or a larger car for family holidays. Provided the customer gives 7 days notice for the type of car needed, ALD would guarantee the choice of car.

ALDO, which ALD Automotive describes as a smart mobility assistant can provide flexibility in a different way. “We have to be much closer to the drivers than we have been”, says Tim, “I would say that today, of course we are in touch with the drivers but our main contact is still typically the corporate entity, where there is a fleet manager and they are the ones communicating with the drivers. But to be able to handle all the needs and the flexibility of the drivers, we need to be closer.

“That’s basically why we started looking at ALDO. With an iPhone 4S or if you already have a 5, you can do a lot of these things, but ALDO is not assigned to a specific telephone or tablet, it’s an application that can run even on an iPhone 3 and it has voice recognition. If you have a Blackberry, you would still be able to use the voice recognition.”

ALDO will also run on Android or Blackberry devices as well as tablet computers and PCs. “It’s a pilot right now in Paris”, continues Tim, “We have 1,000 drivers since it’s been launched and the ALDO application is developed with Orange, which is one of our major clients.”

System users start by entering a profile of themselves, which would include whether they want to be, “time efficient”, or, “CO2 efficient”. The user would also specify which means of transport they would want to use. This could include car, bicycle, public transport (train, metro, or bus) and walking. For journey planning, ALDO can be programmed with the desired arrival time and would then calculate the journey, making allowance for traffic conditions and delays in public transport to calculate a start time. If the journey involved car parking, ALDO can advise where there are available parking spaces, and the time it would take to the nearest public transport link. It even includes expected weather conditions. Journeys can be automatically uploaded to the user’s diary.

An hour or two before the journey is due to start; ALDO will recalculate the entire journey, checking on traffic conditions and any delays with public transport. Then the system would adjust the departure time accordingly to ensure that the user would still arrive on time. ALDO is connected to the systems measuring traffic flow and public transport systems, constantly gathering data on train or metro delays and updating the journey plan.

“Most of the users will also have a company car from us”, continues Tim, “Using ALDO they can book maintenance, or find the cheapest fuel filling station on the chosen route. You can buy tyres, ticketing for your journeys, or ask ALD questions. For our company car users, ALDO will help us to manage our drivers and also touch upon people who are not eligible for a company car. A fleet manager who today, for instance, runs 1,000 vehicles, can have a tool to handle other parts of the business.”

This could include car rental and car sharing. ALD Automotive has its own car sharing system. Bosch in France for example uses the car sharing system and ALDO will be used as the reservation module for it.

The pilot programme was scheduled to run for around three months, enabling ALD to monitor what was working well and to iron out any bugs in the system. After that, ALD plans to roll the system out in Western Europe during 2013. “It’s quite an easy task”, reckons Tim, “What will have to be done for each country is to link up to the available open data.” ALD has had discussions with the Paris administration, which can see a lot of interest in initiatives such as ALDO and is very willing to help make the system work effectively.

“I think there’s a good basis for common development with the cities, because they need these kind of tools to handle increasing traffic and to try and reduce pollution. So I think we will be targeting the Benelux countries, which are quite advanced on all the mobility ideas. In the Nordic countries people are working very hard to find new means of dealing with these issues. We would see that we would be launching this in 6 or 7 countries next year, if everything goes well with the pilot.”

“We have had a joint venture partner in China since 2009 and a big problem in China is that they are increasing the regulation of traffic. For instance in 2011, they cut the number of cars that were allowed to be sold in Beijing. Overnight they said basically instead of selling 800,000 cars you are allowed to sell 250,000 cars. These are the kind of tools that the Chinese are quite interested in, so we are expecting a Chinese delegation from Shanghai to come in, probably early next year, to have a look at some of these things.

“Electric vehicles still have some way to go in Europe before they become mainstream and China may be moving faster than Europe in this area.”