Rocco Marrari presented a common scenario: a carrier loses three tractors and investigators head to their last known GPS coordinates. When they get there, they find the ELD ripped out and tossed to the ground.
“The bad guys now realize the ELD is the GPS, so they rip that ELD out, leave it behind, and keep going with the tractor,” said Marrari, vice president of sales at Pedigree Technologies. “When you think about something like a tail light, it’s simple and nobody knows it’s hidden. With the tail light tracker, we can ping it on demand, alert authorities, and actually find where the tractor is.”
Hiding a GPS inside a component is the idea behind Pedigree’s new Tail Light Tracker, which the company announced at the Truckload Carriers Association annual Truckload conference held last week in Orlando. The device is a DOT-approved GPS tracker built directly into a standard 4-inch LED tail light housing, designed to be undetectable to would-be thieves.
The appeal of the product, Marrari said, is that it isn’t a wired device bolted underneath a trailer. It isn’t a box held on by Velcro that a thief can remove in a few seconds. The tracker looks and functions like the tail light it replaces.
Marrari explained that installation takes minutes and can be done by anyone in maintenance or anyone who has ever changed a tail light. It has a rechargeable battery that charges whenever the running or brake lights are on, and the internal battery sustains it for up to 90 days when a trailer is dropped and sits unhooked.
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During normal operation, location is updated every 15 minutes while the trailer is moving and every four hours when it’s stationary, Josh DeCook, Pedigree’s vice president of product management, explained.
Ping intervals can also be customized by fleet and triggered as an on-demand, real-time ping at any time through Pedigree’s OneView app, with open APIs available for carriers that want to integrate location data into their own TMS or visibility tools. It runs on GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, and cellular networks across North America.
The unit is available in round, rectangular and oval versions for various trailer and equipment configurations, and the company said it will explore additional versions after requests at the conference. It carries an IP67 rating with the ability to operate in extreme temperatures from northern Canada to southern Mexico.
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More than just location
The tracker also functions as a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) gateway, enabling it to communicate with nearby BLE-enabled sensors and tags on the same trailer, such as cargo sensors, door sensors, and tire pressure monitors.
That means in addition to tracking where the trailer is, it’s tracking what’s happening to it — from a door open at the wrong time to a tire losing pressure at midnight.
“We want to really expand visibility and help our fleets understand not only where the trailer is but what’s happened with the trailer and the cargo associated with that trailer,” Marrari said.
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The Tail Light Tracker is available as a monthly subscription of roughly $10 to $12 per unit, which Marrari said is designed to let fleets test its usability.
While Pedigree declined to disclose specific deployment numbers, DeCook said demand has been strong for transportation tracking. The company is selling directly to fleets and is in discussion with trailer manufacturers about offering the device as a factory-installed option.
Owner-operators have also emerged as a customer segment, Marrari said.
