Field guides for people who have to make these calls.
Written by the crew that does the wiring, for the fleet managers who have to decide what goes in the trucks and who puts it there. No vendor pitch — these are the things we would tell you on the phone, written down so you can use them whether or not you ever call us.
How to plan a fleet telematics rollout without parking your trucks.
Most rollouts do not stall because someone picked the wrong platform — they stall because hardware showed up before the decisions did. The sequence we use, from fleet audit through verification.
- The six decisions to make before hardware ships
- Why you pilot on five vehicles before touching five hundred
- Sequencing installs around dispatch instead of against it
- Five rollout mistakes that cost real money
Why fleet telematics hardware fails — and how to catch it early.
When a gateway stops reporting, the first assumption is a bad unit. Usually the hardware is fine and the install is failing — and swapping in another unit wired the same way buys you a few months and the same phone call.
- Reading the failure pattern before you open a dash
- The six install failures we see most often
- A symptom-to-cause table you can work from
- A fleet audit checklist you can run yourself
Switching telematics platforms: what happens to the hardware in your trucks.
Migrations get evaluated on features and pricing. Then somebody has to physically pull one system out of every vehicle and put another in, without stranding a truck or breaking a compliance record.
- Wiring debt, and why it compounds with every migration
- What a clean de-install actually involves
- Sequencing a cutover so vehicles go down once, not twice
- Seven questions to ask before you sign
Why we write these
Forty combined years in 12-volt work, from stereo shops to fleet telematics, means we have seen most of the ways this goes wrong — usually while cleaning up after it. Fleet managers keep asking the same questions, and the answers are not proprietary. They are just hard to find written down by someone who has actually been under the dash.
If a guide answers your question and you never call us, that is a fine outcome. If it makes clear that the wiring is worth taking seriously, that is a better one.
Have a question these did not answer?
Call and ask. We would rather talk through your actual fleet than have you guess from an article. Quotes within 48 hours.