If you get or have an EV in your fleet and you go through the rigmarole of organising a charger or two on-site.

But how do you know – really know – what your EV is doing compared to an ICE (Internal combustion engine) powered vehicle?

You probably don’t, but NZ fleet telematics company Sensium can tell you.

Sensium’s TRACKbox TB2 vehicle telematics hardware, along with its UI (User Interface) Sensium Connect, can accurately show the performance and status of your EV(s) alongside the ICE vehicles in the fleet.

CEO of Sensium, Jeremy McLean explains: “Up until now, data interpretation from an ICE vehicle has been simple enough to access – Sensium has been providing that data across customers for nearly two decades, supplying fleet health assessments, mileage reports, service and maintenance histories, fuel use, tyre temperature and pressure, driving habits, location monitoring via GPS and more.

“By 2018, Sensium had a good handle on what fleet managers needed and could use to maximise their fleet’s bottom line, but there was a change in the wind…”

With the hints of vehicle electrification came a new challenge: cutting edge data management systems of the day couldn’t ‘talk’ to an EV in a common ‘language’ – vehicle information for EVs and ICE vehicles is about as closely related as vegetables are to fruit – Brussels Sprouts to Kumquats (or should that be KumkWatts?).  

It was in 2018 when Jeremy and his development teams began developing a ‘universal translator’, for their then newly developed TRACKbox TB2.

A game-changer in the vehicle data space, it accesses, interprets and stores data from the vehicle’s CAN bus (Controlled Area Network) bus system – the Holy Grail of the modern vehicle.

CAN bus is like body’s nervous system for vehicles. Electronic control units (ECUs) act as parts of the body, and the CAN bus allows communication between ECUs.

Whether your fleet vehicles are EV, ICE or moonbeam powered, Sensium’s TB2 can tell you what they’re doing, displaying ICE and EV data on the same Sensium Connect Fleet Vehicle Telematics dashboard.   

You can – for example – monitor the level of charge for an EV battery at the same time as reading the amount of fuel in an ICE vehicle. An EV’s battery temperature can line up with an ICE vehicle’s coolant levels and diagnostic trouble codes for either vehicle can also be displayed.

Add to this the traditional fleet management data such as GPS monitoring, driver identification, service recording with the assurance of local backup and support and Sensium’s game-changing TB2 is looking more and more like a must have.

With that being said, now’s the time to get online at sensium.nz to arrange your TB2 demonstration. And while you are at it, ask the Sensium team about the new Sensium Energy EV charging solutions available.