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When Ronny New installed the first telematics device in his fleet, he thought it was broken. The general manager for Austin, TX-based Southside Towing was interested in using telematics devices from Networkcar to help locate and dispatch his wreckers when the City of Austin needed a vehicle towed away. To find out how well it worked, he had one unit installed in the oldest truck in the fleet. The GPS-based location function worked like a dream, but New kept getting e-mail after e-mail informing him that the truck was throwing fault codes.
IT MUST BE BROKEN... RIGHT?
What did New do with all those e-mails? Well, he didn't install the unit to get maintenance alerts, so he ignored them.
"We run our old trucks 24 hours a day, because we try to use them up, and I had put the unit in our oldest truck," New explains. "So I'm receiving all these e-mails every day, and I'm wondering, 'What is going on?' I thought it was broken, because I was receiving too many e-mails! I just ignored it, thinking the system wasn't working, that it had a short in it and it kept sending me stuff."
But at the end of the month, New decided to bring the truck in for an inspection, and he was surprised by what he found. Every maintenance alert that Networkcar had sent to his e-mail in box was legit.
"Sure enough," he says, "it had all these things that were coming up, ABS sensors, everything.
"We'd never had a truck that could talk to us," he says. "We just thought, 'It can't be,' because if there was something wrong, if all these codes were true, the truck would be sitting on the side of the road. From that point on, we started bringing it in, and sure enough, all these little things started adding up."
FASTER DISPATCH
Even after that stellar performance, New had trouble convincing the owner of the company to equip the entire fleet with Networkcar units, but in the end he prevailed. Today, two years after that trial run, all 21 wreckers in the Southside fleet keep in touch with the home base with a telematics unit that is transparent to the driver.
