Over the last few years, as the variety of applications for telematics has expanded, we have heard many requests for vehicle access and management solutions. Whether for public car sharing, corporate and government carpooling, key management automation, or new mobility business models, fleet managers need more advanced ways to control and manage keys.
Top five challenges of carpools
Many organisations have larger than needed fleets. This means they have massive underutilisation and unnecessary increased costs associated with maintaining those assets.
In any organisation, it is important to utilise all assets as efficiently and effectively as possible. This is sometimes difficult with carpools. Here’s why:
- TCO — The total cost of ownership becomes very high, especially when all vehicles are not being used in the same way and potentially sitting in parking lots not being used.
- Key management — Organisations must plan manual and physical ways to coordinate key drop-off and pick-ups, which becomes increasingly difficult during times such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Billing and paperwork — When carpools are shared between different departments, it increases manual billings and paperwork which can become time consuming for everyone involved.
- Sustainability — Fleets with excessive vehicles have a larger carbon footprint. This works against company goals for reducing the use of combustion engine vehicles or decreasing carbon emissions.
- Increased costs — There is an increase in costs including annual maintenance and labor, such as having to jumpstart a vehicle with a dead battery because of underutilisation.
Introducing Geotab Keyless: a best-in-class digital key solution
Geotab Keyless is an ultra-flexible, scalable solution for digitised car keys.
Our goal from the start was to offer a solution that would work for all of our customers. Integrating existing lock/unlock technology had various challenges.
We concluded that building or buying the solution would not meet the uptime, vehicle coverage, and simplicity that our customers demand from us. For this reason, we decided to approach this problem with a platform approach, bringing in vendor hardware technologies where it makes sense over time.
Geotab Keyless is a digital key solution to help maximise carpool utilisation, providing a seamless car sharing experience and reduction in costs. Here are a few benefits of using the digital key solution:
- Secured and keyless access:
Geotab Keyless eliminates the need for physical keys and helps organisations ensure only authorised employees have access to vehicles.
- Improved utilisation and aid in rightsizing your fleet:
Get complete fleet visibility to reduce, repurpose or redistribute assets to increase utilisation. With more drivers sharing one car, you can grow carsharing without growing the number of vehicles. Plus, Keyless makes it easier to prioritise vehicles with the lowest kilometers to maximise usage.
- Seamless car sharing operations:
Geotab Keyless makes it easy to share vehicles between departments. Additionally, you can digitise billings with integrated software to reduce overall paperwork.
- Reduce costs and save time:
No staff is needed to physically manage keys or replace lost keys which will lead to a reduction in costs and save time.
- Meet sustainability goals:
With all vehicles being properly utilised, organisations can work toward achieving their sustainability goals.
How Geotab Keyless works
The system works on practically every modern vehicle and installation is simple. The Keyless unit plugs into the GO device, and the GO device into the OBDII port. Geotab maintains the security of the digital keys throughout its lifecycle. Coupling the lock control functionality provided by IOX-KEYLESS with Geotab’s massive proprietary vehicle diagnostics database creates a secured and reliable shared-mobility solution for commercial fleets.
In addition, we have a number of Add-On solutions that are particularly useful for vehicle fleets including crash and tow detection, in-cabin connected cameras, big data analysis toolkits, and the ability to expand functionality in the vehicle using available commercial, off-the-shelf IOX hardware.
Changes in mobility have led to a need for new business tools. Digitisation of the keyfobs itself is one of these tools. Another is a method for remotely assigning their drivers to their vehicles. In the case of public car sharing, this means one user can book a specific vehicle with some (if minimal) advance notice. For government and corporate carpooling, this might mean allowing the user to reserve vehicles in the same way they might reserve a meeting room.
For simple key management, a set of drivers could share access to a particular vehicle simultaneously for many months. We decided the best way to serve our customers was to partner with best-in-class software companies to provide market-focused solutions for each of these areas.
Whether you are new to shared mobility, or would like to learn more, find out how Geotab can supercharge your carpool by visiting: geotab.com/keyless
