GPS Insight Blog

About once a month we hear from a customer who has recovered a stolen vehicle using GPS Insight (the other day we heard from a Miracle Method franchisee which led police to a recently stolen vehicle and had it recovered in >> SIX MINUTES <<).

But honestly, that’s not what our customers purchase GPS Insight for — it’s a nice side benefit, but most companies purchase in order to gain efficiencies, save money on fuel by curbing idling, off-hours usage, etc.

Here’s an out of the ordinary story about finding a lost vehicle using GPS Insight which occurred last month:

I paid a visit to a Las Vegas tour company last month because I had 4 days in Vegas for a conference & wanted to visit some of our customers there.

One of this company’s tours takes passengers to an extremely remote rim of the Grand Canyon.

The same day I visited, one of their vehicles got stuck in the mud well outside of cell phone coverage, and used their satellite phone in order to ask for help. They stated they were 35 miles “onto the dirt road” but really didn’t know where they were.

Unfortunately while our GPS tracking works just about everywhere since we use AT&T and partner (T-Mobile) coverage, we had lost coverage of the vehicle right where the cell coverage ran out, so using GPS Insight wouldn’t help in this situation.

Or would it…? I asked the manager when the last time another vehicle took that route was, and he told me back on the 5th of February, a particular vehicle ran the same tour on that same remote, dirt road.

I ran the history for that day for that truck using our interface like this:

The scenic history of that vehicle’s trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is shown below (along with the fact that the tour remained there for 1 hour, 36 minutes):

Then I used the path distance measuring tool in our 3-D mapping platform (Google Earth) to measure exactly 35 miles from where the road turns to dirt. That placed the “in trouble” vehicle exactly at Craig Ranch Road:

They were then able to send the towtruck to that remote intersection and know that they would find the vehicle. It was getting dark and the group of tourists had been stuck in the mud instead of viewing the Grand Canyon. This was the first “breakdown” this well-known tour company has ever had. Thankfully I was able to help them significantly narrow down the search area.

As much as I hoped to hear things would go well, I had a meeting to get to, and left, then found out the next day that they were able to find the truck and everything wound up good.

I was curious how close I was to accurately defining the vehicle’s location (or really, how accurate the driver was when he said they were 35 miles onto the dirt road), so I pulled all history for the day of my visit, and see that we were only 2.3 miles from where the vehicle was actually stuck.

I can also see at a glance what time they got moving again (the green (moving) points in and out of the “stuck” area have the time right before and after the long stuck-in-the-mud experience) — from 12:44 to 18:03 — roughly 6 1/4 hours.

I like to think I helped that tow truck to find the stuck vehicle, but even if we hadn’t, GPS Insight provides a great way to document exactly where and when that vehicle got stuck, and what time it was back on its way home.

Additionally, we are able to show where the AT&T coverage stops and you can see that the coverage extends almost all of the way to the end of their trip. It is very rare to lose AT&T coverage for our customers, but if and when they do, we can very precisely determine where the remote fleet vehicle does or does not have coverage. The height of each “pin” shows how long the vehicle was out of range of cellular coverage. What we call “lag” is how long it takes for the data to get to our database from the time the unit transmits — note typically it’s only 2-5 seconds, sometimes 10, when in good cell coverage, which is 98% of the time for all of our tracked vehicles.

The truck was out of cell coverage for 25 miles as shown by the measurement below.

Bear in mind that where we are in coverage, it’s typically only a few seconds from the time the vehicle reports its position until it’s available to our customer. This vehicle goes to some pretty desolate areas.

Additionally, bear in mind that using satellite communication to transmit vehicle location costs >> SEVENTY TIMES MORE << than cellular costs. A typical 1 Megabyte plan is $10 per month. A typical satellite 100 Kilobyte (1/10th of 1 megabyte) is $70, last time I checked. That’s why this customer doesn’t mind losing track of its vehicles for this short period of time/distance. They know where they’re at since they know when they went out of range, and on what road. Once they get back into coverage, all that data is sent back to the servers, so things like speeding, stop duration, excessive idling, and engine trouble codes are all “stored and forwarded” for analysis/alerts/reports later by management.

Some day I may have time to take one of these tours, I live in AZ and have for almost 5 years, and still haven’t seen the Grand Canyon other than from an airplane (which is about every month as often as I fly over it).

This was a long article, thanks for reading it.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking