IAA Transportation Key Takeaways: An Electrifying Industry That Opens Opportunities for Advanced Fleet Planning Solutions

By Ryan Wiggin | 3Q 2024 | IN-7532

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IAA Transportation 2024 took place in Hannover, Germany from September 17-22, covering the logistics, transportation, and commercial vehicles sector. Based on the products and solutions on show, four major conclusions could be drawn:

1. The transition of commercial vehicle fleets to alternative energy sources is a leading focus for technology providers and is being led by the supply side.
2. Electrification of commercial fleets is well underway, despite the slowdown in the consumer Electric Vehicle (EV) market.
3. Fleet management and telematics solutions need to evolve beyond asset tracking and monitoring if they are to stand out and extend use cases through the energy transition.
4. Integration of solutions remains a core requirement. Coordinating vehicle tracking, driver monitoring, cargo monitoring, fuel management, routing, and predictive maintenance (to name a few), and leveraging a single source of truth is an essential factor that providers must support before deploying more advanced solutions.

• Electrification: All the major truck manufacturers (Volkswagen (VW), Mercedes, DAF, Daimler, Scania, and MAN) were showcasing their electric trucks or ability to support the EV/hybrid transition through broader professional services.
• Alternative Fuel Sources: Alternatives like hydrogen and natural gas were present, but had a much more muted showing compared to electrification. Iveco Group, among others, showcased its multi-energy strategy, but electrification was the main event.
• Surrounded by Battery Manufacturers: Alongside many of the truck providers stood the battery manufacturers providing to said market. Batteries seem to be becoming more accessible and more flexible in terms of application. CATL highlighted its battery that can be applied to any existing truck to transition it to hybrid or fully electric.
• Last-Mile and Urban Delivery Is the Immediate Opportunity: All providers confirmed that this is the area seeing the most traction and growing substantially, despite broader market volatility.
• Charging Station Providers Were the Next Largest Feature: Siemens stood out as the mature provider in this space, showcasing its Megawatt (MW) charging station and gantry crane charging solution for facilities. Other providers working their way up from 200 Kilowatts (kw), to 400 kw, to MW capabilities included Milence, Alpitronic, and TotalEnergies.
• "The Grid" Remains the One to Blame for Holding Back the Transition: While this is the case, energy companies like Eon are offering full package solutions in deploying commercial charging stations at scale, partnering with hardware providers (as mentioned above) to support installations.
• Fleet Telematics Is Well-Established, Fleet Insights Must Develop to Stand Out: There's a consensus that aftermarket providers are best in class, few Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are experimenting in this sector, and many aftermarket providers are establishing partnerships with OEMs for immediate integration.
  • Geotab was the only telematics provider to put Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the forefront of its strategy, with innovation on the Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) side to support more intuitive interaction with fleet platforms.
  • Samsara also showed innovation on the data privacy and sharing side, allowing companies to better share tracking information without divulging sensitive information. It also showed one of the more impressive looking vehicle tracking interfaces.
• An Underlying Move from Point Solutions to Connected Systems: The industry continues to strive toward interconnected platforms, but data privacy concerns remain a significant barrier. Proving to end users that cybersecurity is a top priority and competitiveness can be maintained when sharing data is essential.
• Routing and Maintenance Should Now Be at the Forefront of Fleet Management: HERE Technologies showed strength in this area, highlighting its last-mile routing capabilities and driver engagement tools to support advanced and varied tour planning. HERE also showed how the platform can be leveraged to plan, execute, and analyze plans with an immediate feedback loop, creating more advanced and dynamic planning.

IAA presented a view of the transport market, largely from the perspective of the commercial vehicle providers and those companies gearing up to supply the energy transition. The overarching focus on electrification and alternative energy sources seems contradictory to the slowdown in the consumer EV market, as highlighted in ABI Insight "What Does the Slowdown in the EV Transition Mean for the Software-Defined Vehicle?" But it gives a good indication that the commercial vehicle market remains steadfast on enabling end users to transition their fleets, all the way from heavy trucks to last-mile vehicles.

As with any emerging market, solution providers are still finding their place and focusing on early-stage installations and pilot projects to prove the concept. Partnerships between charging station providers and energy companies will likely continue as a way of overcoming access to grid constraints, but solution providers should also be focused on creating hardware that is adaptable to unique environments (such as gantry crane charging stations for distribution center yards) and provide management software that enables users to understand, manage, and improve their charging infrastructure once deployed.

For the companies wanting to, and in the process of transitioning to EVs, fleet management and telematics solutions will play an even bigger role in smoothing this transition, primarily through analysis of network setup. Companies' fleets will become increasingly mixed and have different requirements depending on fuel type, requiring both smarter routing and predictive maintenance capabilities. Solutions that can handle more end points, vehicle types, and road restrictions, and provide users with actionable insights off the back of this analysis will stand out over solutions that remain limited to simple track and trace. Such ingestion and analysis of large data pools is exactly where AI can and should be leveraged, and while some providers are exploring such applications, many still lack the ability to analyze large matrixes of information, limiting the advanced capabilities that will be essential sidekicks in the move to alternative fleets.