General Motors (GM) announced Thursday its partnership with Spireon, the largest aftermarket telematics provider in the U.S., in a move that is designed to offer the company’s commercial customers richer access to vehicle data from a single secure source.
Between its OnStar service, 4G LTE WiFi capabilities and telematics suite, GM has more than 50,000 fleet vehicles using at least one of these solutions. Additionally, Spireon says it currently has 800,000 GM vehicles already operating on its NSpire platform that logs mileage, location data, trip information, time of day, braking and acceleration and event data.
Under the partnership, and using the embedded OnStar 4G LTE hardware in the vehicles, Spireon will offer a customized version of its FleetLocate tool.
“FleetLocate connected by OnStar helps make it fast and easy for fleet managers to gain valuable vehicle and driver insights from their fleets wherever they are, with no installation downtime,” says Kevin Weiss, CEO of Spireon.
Ed Peper, vice president of GM fleet, says the telematics platform partnership offers fleets the ability to efficiently manage assets, identify cost drivers, optimize performance and encourage safe driving across mixed and aged fleets.
The Spireon platform uses OnStar’s application program interface (API) and Greg Ross, OnStar’s director of business development and alliance, says the system was designed to detect and prevent cyber intrusion.
The partnership will launch in May.
GM’s commercial sales are up 36 percent since 2013 and boosted share by .5 point from 2015 thanks in part to the company’s efforts to reduce rental sales to unlock product availably to customers and improve residual values.
Ross says GM has processed more than 1.5 billion customer requests through OnStar since 1996 and 4.5 million vehicles are OnStar LTE-equipped globally.
Spireon’s FleetLocate joins a roster of GM Fleet business solutions that includes a version of Telogis Fleet for GM and GM’s own Commercial Link tool. Each solution is turnkey and scalable, helping provide cost savings by eliminating hardware costs and installation.