The commercial division within the Ford Motor Company, Ford Pro, has spent the past year or so developing software and services to give fleet managers more insight into their commercial vehicles and how they are operated to optimise management and manage risks, and has now expanded its data-driven capabilities for subscribers of its Telematics and E-Telematics product lines.
Ford Pro’s mission is to develop solutions to deliver an always-on, connected customer experience through a suite of products, including vehicles, charging, software, financing and service for all commercial and government customers. It looks to pull data from connected vehicles and integrate it into the Ford Pro Intelligence platform to arm fleet managers with a new level of insight about and control over vehicles on the road and when upfitted equipment is in use.
In January 2024, Ford Pro made significant enhancements to its core solution based on the need for fleet managers to deal with more workloads than ever, such as managing fleets, maximising uptime and minimising the risks of accidents to drivers, vehicles and their business.
Available later this year, the updates include technology to support fleet start inhibitors, top speed limiters and acceleration inhibitors. In addition, and as part of the firm’s commitment to iterative software development, Ford Pro said the monthly updates will deliver a more intuitive, efficient user experience and enhance its products’ core performance and capabilities.
To help combat theft and unauthorised vehicle use, fleet managers can use fleet start inhibitors to remotely disable a vehicle’s engine. The top speed limiter feature, meanwhile, will enable fleet managers to remotely set a maximum speed limit on their fleet vehicles to help avoid speeding violations. In addition, the developers can help improve driver behaviour by controlling speed limit adherence for millions of fleet vehicles on the road.
The latter capability will be available in Ford Pro Telematics software later this year on model-year 2022 and newer F-150 Lightning trucks and model-year 2023 and newer Super Duty trucks.
The acceleration limiter function is designed to give fleet managers remote access to control vehicle acceleration, which can help reduce vehicle wear and tear. This is will also be introduced later this year to Ford Pro Telematics software for F-150 Lightning trucks.
Other functionality upgrades will see dashcam events summarised on a single page on the Ford Pro Telematics dashboard, allowing fleet managers to view events for all cameras in a group. The developers say the update allows users to navigate to dashcam information in two clicks, saving fleet managers time and energy.
By toggling to an events tab, fleet managers who have associated dashcams with specific vehicles can view the events in the group. Events can be sorted alphabetically by type. The vehicle, driver, timestamp, location and dashcam video are also provided.
Clicking an event displays the relevant trip history while clicking the vehicle name shows the vehicle overview. Fleet managers can also click on the dashcam video to view it. Filtering also allows fleet managers to find specific event types, vehicles or dashcam recordings.
