Fleet telematics is the combination of GPS location, data read from the vehicle itself, and a cellular connection that sends both somewhere you can use them. In practice it turns "where is truck 12 and what has it been doing" from a phone call into a screen.
What does a telematics system actually track?
Three streams, arriving together. Location and route history come from GPS. Vehicle data comes from the engine bus or the OBD port. Driving events come from an accelerometer that knows the difference between a pothole and a panic stop.
- Where: live position, route history, arrival and departure times, time spent at each stop.
- What the vehicle reports: engine hours, odometer, fault codes, battery voltage, fuel or charge level where the vehicle exposes it.
- How it is driven: speeding, harsh braking, rapid acceleration, sharp cornering, idling.
- What you drew on the map: geofence entry and exit against jobsites, yards and customer locations.
What changes once it is running?
The honest answer is that the data is not the point. What changes is the number of questions you can answer without picking up the phone. Four come up constantly:
- "Where is my driver?" Answered from the map instead of a call that interrupts the driver.
- "Were we actually there?" Answered with timestamped arrival, time on site and departure, which is what settles a billing dispute.
- "Whose fault was that?" Answered with GPS history, or with footage if you also run video safety cameras.
- "What is this vehicle costing us?" Answered with idling, engine hours and fault codes, before the fault becomes a breakdown.
AirIQ publishes its own figures for what customers see here: 56% prevent accidents, 20% cut costs and 12% exonerate drivers. Those are AirIQ's published marketing claims rather than independently audited benchmarks, so treat them as a direction of travel rather than a forecast for your fleet.
What hardware does it take?
Three shapes, and the right one depends on what you are tracking rather than on what you spend.
- OBD plug-in. Goes into the diagnostic port in about 15 minutes. No wiring, no downtime, easy to move between vehicles. See IQ-Plug.
- Hardwired. Professional fit, harder to remove, adds inputs and outputs for things like PTO, door sensors and starter disable. See IQ-Wired.
- Battery powered. For trailers, containers and equipment with no power to draw on. Years on one set of batteries. See trailer and asset tracking.
Where does video fit in?
Video telematics is the same system with footage attached. The tracker tells you a hard brake happened at 2:14pm on Route 9. The camera tells you the car that cut in caused it. That difference is the whole argument in a disputed claim, which is why fleets that carry passengers or run dense urban routes tend to add cameras first.