The exhibition at the fleet conference organised by the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia (IPWEA) gets bigger every year. Fleet industry suppliers can show their wares, and delegates can go up to their displays and find out more about service providers and what they offer. Caroline Falls from Fleet News Group talked to a few of them at the 2023 IPWEA Fleet Conference held in Brisbane during March.
Roev is offering to convert traditional utes with internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. “We came to show fleet there’s another way to electrify their utes,” said Rattrey-Wood. He said once scheduled, an ICE to EV ute conversion would take about one week, and cost about $50,000.
Left to right, John Egyud and Husam Desuqi manned the booth of international and leading telematics provider Geotab. Geotab specialises in data collection and reverse engineering of vehicle data, and many aspects of fleet management, including monitoring and managing driver behaviour. It has millions of vehicles around the world on its system and the data it collects can help inform decisions about what EV is suitable in lieu of a traditional ICE vehicle as fleets decarbonise.
Left to right, Michael Spyro, Chris Campbell, and Phil Tyne, are from Battery House Australia, which imports and sells the Amaron long-life vehicle battery from India. The battery sales slogan is “Last long, really long.” Spyro said the distinctive green cased battery last 10 years thanks to a silver protection inside, or more than twice the life of a conventional battery for cars, 4x4s, vans and trucks. The green indicates its credential for outlasting its competitors. Spyro said the Amaron battery is the biggest selling battery in Malaysia, Singapore and India, and fleet buyers were a key reason for the top billing. “So I said to my friend, Phil, ‘We need to get into fleet.’ And so he found this and we’re here to talk to everyone here about the best batteries on the market right now called Amaron batteries.”
VicOne: Left to right, Solutions Engineer Michael Fulgencio and Business Development Manager Chelsea Chen. VicOne’s slogan is Driving Automotive Security Forward. Chen tells me a story to illustrate how VicOne can help a fleet avoid a cyber attack. In Russia, somewhere, one day, some 300 taxis went to the same pickup address. “We can send out notifications to customers of a transaction anomaly and we can look into it first,” said Chen. Chen said VicOne was in a class of its own in the automative space because it specialised in monitoring the transaction from the app server to check for errors. VicOne is a unit of 30-year old cybersecurity group Trend Micro.
beCarWise: Account Manager Aaron White said the Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) exemption introduced by the Federal Government late in 2022 caused a flurry of activity for novated lease providers like beCarWise. “The inquiry levels have literally gone vertical off the back of the legislation that was passed through the Senate before Christmas, because running an electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid through a novated lease program, you don’t pay any FBT.”
