FEATURE: Smart trucks

As fleet operators face ever stricter emissions targets and higher upfront costs, digital solutions are revolutionizing the road freight industry, becoming essential tools for navigating the transition to electric HGVs. Despite HGVs accounting for a smaller percentage of vehicles on the road compared to cars, trucks have a disproportionate effect on total road transport emissions. As governments around the world legislate decarbonization targets and cut off dates for the sale of diesel trucks, the need to grow the market for low and zero emission commercial vehicles increases.

Digital solutions have emerged as key facilitators for road freight operators to optimize emissions and reduce costs. In the early stages of eHGV adoption, digital visibility and data-led insights will be an essential tool for OEMs to communicate the benefits of switching to an electric powertrain despite higher upfront purchase prices. As Alaina Scott, Global Product Leader at Carrier Transicold explains, "Digital tools help the assets - the traditional hardware - to transform from passive assets to intelligent, well managed components of the supply chain that help companies to run leaner, greener and smarter."

While some OEMs like Carrier Transicold develop their own software solutions in house, many vehicle manufacturers are turning to software as a service (SaaS) or partnerships with specialist digital solutions providers. "OEMs want to have a credible advisory service that's based on evidence," says Angus Webb, Founder and CEO of Dynamon. "If fleets trust that it's correct, it will help to maintain that successful relationship between the OEM and the customer." Dynamon's Zero platform is designed to help operators plan how to electrify their fleets. "It's not possible for every company to just put their hand in their pocket and spend a ton of money on chargers everywhere. It's got to be very carefully orchestrated and planned, and it's all to do with capital spend optimization," Webb explains.

Zero considers everything from the vehicle's aerodynamic drag to the topography of its routes, payload requirements and mileage to identify where eHGVs could be introduced to an operation. Optimal battery configurations and charging provision can be planned based on data from existing fleet movements.

Machine learning
There are two key aspects of the digital decarbonization journey that go hand in hand. Firstly, effective planning by analyzing existing telematics data to ensure fleets are equipped with appropriate vehicles to complete the job. Secondly, asset management to not only optimize existing diesel vehicles but to realize the financial benefits of electrified powertrains.

Carrier Transicold's Lynx Fleet platform gives operators real time monitoring of temperature controlled assets. Data includes the refrigeration unit operating mode, set temperature and current temperature. Operators can set alerts when temperatures stray out of a set range and take action to ensure compliance.

Non-compliance scenarios would go unnoticed without this kind of visibility, potentially resulting in product loss. Optimized use of temperature controlled assets alone can contribute to lower CO2 emissions but the proportion of time the unit is running on diesel versus electric has huge emissions saving opportunities. At a depot, the refrigeration unit can either run on the industrial diesel engine or plug into an electric outlet.

Electrical demand is far lower than that of an electric vehicle, which makes this kind of infrastructure at depots more achievable. Once appropriate infrastructure investments are made, usage can be tracked to report accurate CO2 emissions reductions and identify where best practices are not being actioned. Visibility itself, though, does not solve the complete puzzle.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to expand existing functionality of digital solutions. "Atop that visibility, we also include coaching recommendations," says Scott. "As an OEM, we're the experts so we want to help offer that expertise to our customers through Lynx Fleet." A future iteration of this support could be benchmarking data to illustrate industry trends. "We're doing the research so in the next three to four years, we'll be able to layer on top of that coaching what we see not just from one customer but aggregated anonymized data from the industry. Then we can recommend how a customer adjusts based on that data.

So, it takes coaching to the next level." Discussing the wide reaching benefits of AI, Webb says, "AI will change literally everything. It is completely changing how you build software.

It's also giving you way more power around complicated data sets which previously would have been almost impossible to get into software to do analysis on them." The potential for AI in road transport logistics appears boundless. "Right now, you're seeing generative AI and machine learning everywhere," says Scott. "Those are tools that we're starting to implement more and more across our products. Custom AI agents for business automation, customer service, personal productivity, really embedding AI into the software products for smarter decision making."

Digital management
Fleets operated by the likes of the Welch Group in the UK are actively exploring the latest technologies to support their decarbonization strategies. Jamie Sands, Head of Solutions at the Welch Group highlights Optimize by The Algorithm People as a new approach to fleet management using AI. "It essentially does the job of a planner," says Sands. "The way they prove their value is by taking a day, say Thursday last week, they strip out the vehicle allocation and look at the jobs you have to do and get the system to do the same.

They run the same criteria and parameters through their system compared to what you did. I've never seen a human beat it. Sometimes it's 5% better, sometimes it's 15% better."

While the emissions and cost savings of switching to new platforms and electrified powertrains can be clearly illustrated, the tools used to demonstrate this have to be cost effective to justify the investment in eHGVs. "These companies survive in this cost efficient environment, logistics is highly sensitive to that," Webb explains. "For financial directors, their DNA is not to spend money if you don't have to, so that means EVs are seriously held back by that culture because the only way to make it work without much knowledge is to spend lots of money." However, Sands says, "It's about return on investment, how much time it saves and what benefit it can bring.

People think hauliers are nervous about investment or don't like to invest and that's not true. If you look at how much a truck costs, we invest in things that we know have a proven ROI. If you can prove your platform has a good ROI, then I will absolutely invest in it and the level of investment will scale depending on what benefit it has."

With the help of platforms like Zero, operators will be able to tailor eHGVs for the specific route and job it completes. But unlike diesel vehicles, there is an inherent risk in more specialized vehicles that require charging. If the vehicle is not charged overnight or experiences unplanned downtime, fleets lose money. "Ideally you want to use your diesel vehicles less and your EVs more," says Webb. "If it doesn't work, staff will just send the diesels out because it's easier and doesn't require any thought, but it's bad financially.

So, there's a financial benefit in having easy daily planning." To mitigate some of these risks, the Welch Group is engaging with companies working on simulation and digital twin tools. This would enable the haulier to play out worst case scenarios without the potentially catastrophic impact of not being able to get trucks on the road because of a power failure, for example. "You don't want to learn from your mistakes because if you make the mistake, it's already too late," Sands explains.

Looking ahead, Scott sees AI as a key way to unlock the potential of digital tools, "One of the next evolutions will be a personalized and predictive digital experience with AI. It's one thing for first generation AI to say, 'OK, I've scanned everything and here's what I've got to answer your question.' Continuing to take into context more of that personalization, we'll see systems anticipating your needs based on your behaviors and data. I think hyper personalization in digital services will become the norm."

Cybersecurity
As digital platforms evolve to have greater visibility and control over commercial vehicle fleets, data gathered and managed needs robust security. Especially with the rise of AI, businesses must be able to trust that their sensitive information is protected. "Cyber threats evolve every day," says Scott. "Digital systems have to adapt through that zero trust architecture."

Scott anticipates that reassuring customers their information will not be sold or shared will be an important phase in adoption that software providers need to work through. Data breaches not only present negative impacts for the user, software provider and customers, it risks the reputation of the industry and could result in hesitancy to introduce systems that can provide huge benefits for fleet electrification. A key aspect of the long term success of various platforms is their integration and communication with other systems.

Sands says, "More and more people are being asked for their data, whether it's to integrate between platforms, facilitate booking of charging or charging payments, they all want your APIs, they all want your data and those connections but there's an inherent risk with that." Whether it is routing, charging or payment management, the ability to holistically view and optimize a fleet needs to be safe from vulnerabilities. Sands suggests a standardized, anonymized approach would allow companies to share data securely with innovators, academics and other fleets to promote electrification.

Autonomous vehicles
The development of digital solutions today will lay the foundations for the next generation of systems to facilitate the successful deployment of autonomous vehicles. Sands says, "We're really close to autonomous vehicles and the kind of control that AI gives you is going to be crucial to adoption. You don't want sophisticated reorganization using machine learning, advanced autonomous vehicles and a human in the middle that didn't sleep very well last night controlling the whole thing."

Scott agrees, more control will be critical to the success of autonomous vehicles: "You're going to have to be able to make changes based on what the system is learning versus somebody being there to push a button or make an adjustment. "One of the things that I think will be very valuable to understand in a driverless scenario is what's happening and what's going wrong. The investment in that driverless asset is going to be very great so you want to make sure that everything is safe, temperature controlled and protected completely because there's no one there to override, adjust or visually check.

So, when it comes to visibility, you're going to see more and more there to enable autonomous technology." In this sense, the latest digital solutions are a testing ground for future developments that cannot rely on a human redundancy. Lynx Fleet, for example, already allows operators to remotely change running modes and temperature set points.

Establishing best practices that can be trialed before the widespread use of autonomous vehicles should minimize associated risks. For the hauliers that can afford the initial outlay, autonomous vehicles are set to be in high demand. Sands explains, "Autonomy is going to be game changing.

A third of our cost basis is paying driver's wages and another third is diesel, so we can move to electric, and we've got control of our energy costs and then when we move to autonomous vehicles, we've got control of driver costs."