While the world has been rightfully focused on dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic this year, environmental impact remains a critical issue for everyone – especially road users.

Businesses with fleets need to start thinking about how to reduce their carbon footprints in the medium to long term. Companies that use AI-enabled fleet tracking platforms will be a step ahead, as this technology helps businesses make manageable and meaningful inroads into reducing environmental impacts. 

Everyone is busy, and it’s all too easy for the focus on reducing your carbon footprint to get lost in the everyday shuffle. While reducing emissions is a big picture goal that’s often driven from by the senior and director level, the staff that are tasked to work on achieving these goals are busy with day-to-day operations. 

Artificial intelligence can ensure you focus on emissions and going green by introducing additional efficiency to analytics. In the past, you’d have to manually investigate specific issues such as fuel usage by pouring through reports to figure out where vehicles are inefficiently used. AI-driven platforms become your personal data scientist and are less reliant on individuals having to discover and investigate issues manually. 

AI powered platforms give you the ability to identify patterns and signal ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ events instantly via the one system. Thanks to natural language voice search, advanced visualisation techniques and the adoption of machine learning (ML) principles, fleet managers can discover problem areas in the fleet and drill down into solving the issues. 

A recent telematics industry survey¹ found that the technology resulted in:

• 5 percent reduction of kilometres driven.

• 20 percent reduction of idle time.

• 20 percent reduction in fuel expenses.

• 11 percent increase in service delivery/revenue.

• 11 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

• 10 percent increased productivity.

• 15 percent increased vehicle utilisation.

Idle time and driver behaviour

AI assists in reducing harsh usage to improve efficiency across your operations. A key area of impact for sustainability outcomes is idling and driver downtime. Traffic congestion in urban areas is unlikely to be solved any time soon and sitting in traffic during peak-hour is a massive fuel waster and CO₂ contributor. In Local councils are now pushing for central Government to support the introduction of on-the-spot fines. AI-equipped fleet tracking platforms show organisations when and where excessive idling is occurring. 

Poor driving habits such as accelerating hard, only to brake again a minute later, wastes fuel and adds additional CO₂ into the environment. Visualised analytics helps you identify which vehicles are driven harshly, allowing you to then delve further into times, drivers, locations and more to help pinpoint exactly what’s happening – from maintenance schedules missed, to idling at customers.  

Real-time alerts notify fleet managers of harsh braking, fast cornering or speed limit breaches and tailgating as they happen on the road. All of which burn unnecessary fuel, as well as being unsafe for everyone on the road. The real-time alerts let you have a constructive conversation with drivers, educating them around how these behaviours can impact on both safety and the environment.

While route planning has been a staple of GPS-based fleet tracking software for some time now, AI is taking it to new levels. AI and Machine Learning highlight patterns in your routes or schedules that you may not be aware of. You can then discover more efficient routes for your vehicles, which means less time spent on the road, burning fuel and releasing harmful emissions. Shortening the distance vehicles must travel to complete their routes and return to the depot also means less wear and tear on engines, all while you improve efficiencies by allowing your business to complete more work.

AI and ML-based platforms also provide much needed assistance to identify and address maintenance issues with vehicles by automatically bringing potential faults to your attention as they arise. The quicker a company can identify issues in their vehicles and assign a work order to fix them, the quicker additional pollutants – leaking oil, inefficient use of fuel etc., – are being reduced.

A collective responsibility

An AI-powered fleet tracking platform is the next logical step in tackling environmental impact for companies with a vehicle fleet. It makes back-office staff’s job easier by collecting and presenting the information that managers need to make real change within their organisations. A change that will make a difference to many generations to come.