Spireon Inc., an Irvine-based vehicle tracking company, is partnering with Ford to keep tabs on commercial fleets of cars, vans and trucks, with a goal of improving productivity and profitability for customers.
FleetLocate for Ford offers GPS tracking, along with enabling mobile asset management, and driver behavior monitoring, without the need to retrofit vehicles with hardware.Â
Spireon accesses data from vehicles through Ford’s open-platform Transportation Mobility Cloud.
“With this agreement with Ford, we don’t have to install any hardware into the vehicle,” Jason Penkethman, chief product and strategy officer at Irvine-based Spireon told the Business Journal on Aug. 13.
“Ford has got [its] own built-in hardware now, and we are accessing all that data directly from the vehicle through an ecosystem that Ford has created.”
He said the arrangement is preferable to having to install hardware into the vehicles, saving customers time and money.
“All of the model year 2020 vehicles from Ford are going to have the capabilities to support this kind of technology,” he said.
“For older vehicles, we’ll still need to install hardware in there to get the same level or close to it.”
Founded in 2002, Spireon provides technology for vehicles to wirelessly give owners useful information such as location and battery health. Its 4 million subscribers include consumers, auto loan lenders, car dealers, rental car agencies, and fleet operators.
Verizon, CalAmp
FleetLocate provides real-time visibility on the location, activity and status of remote vehicles and drivers to improve fleet utilization, driver safety, and vehicle health.
Penkethman said FleetLocate has been in use for a number of years, and his company already has an arrangement with General Motors.
He said Ford makes the data available from the vehicles through the cloud interface to specific partners and Spireon has been selected as one of their partners. Only a few partners have been selected in the U.S., he said.Â
Other telematics companies Spireon competes with is Irvine’s CalAmp Corp. (Nasdaq: CAMP) and Verizon, which acquired Aliso Viejo-based Telogis in 2016, at a price estimated to be about $850 million.
New Product Interface
The launch of FleetLocate for Ford coincides with the introduction of an enhanced user interface and new diagnostics integration within Spireon’s fleet solution maintenance module.
“We get paid by the fleet companies, and then we pay a small fee back to Ford for accessing the data from the vehicle,” Penkethman said. “We have about 400,000 fleet vehicles that we manage on our platform.”  
