“Sustainability is the big challenge of our time,” said Jameson, adding, “And from a business standpoint, it’s interesting because if you can reduce emissions, reduce the carbon footprint, as opposed to just offsetting it, you’re really making a meaningful difference to the environment.”
Jameson said a 20 percent cut in emissions from route planning and optimisation is typical. He said idle times can be cut 20 percent, and estimated time of arrival on pickups and deliveries can be cut as much as 40 percent.
“If you can reduce the idle time, you’re stopping diesel emissions in a lot of cases,” said Jameson.
HERE Technologies has mapped more than 200 countries. “Almost every major auto OEM, so car manufacturer, truck manufacturers like Isuzu all use our underpinning maps,” said Jameson. HERE Technologies data includes attributes like real time traffic. He said the underpinning navigation is in more than 160 million vehicles globally.
“What we do is provide a digital representation of the world through understanding people, places and things, and how they interconnect. And this is all about a real-time continuously changing view of the world.” said Jameson.
“What sort of things that we can do through technology is having real-time insights around where things are. We can optimise to reduce wait time. I mean lots of time is spent with trucks idling away, waiting to get loads at gates in big yards.”
It’s not just about optimisation of routes on public road networks, it’s also about planning loading and unloading at warehouses and docks, to get visibility of the whole end-to-end story to ensure vehicles are taking the least carbon intensive route possible, said Jameson.
“Some of the things that we’re seeing increasingly of interest by customers are things like building their own private maps — going from the public road network to private road network and being able to navigate across that and optimise routes and reduce the time it takes to move from location to location using technology,” said Jameson.
In the podcast, Jameson talks about a project HERE is currently working on with a European supermarket chain, Switzerland-based Migros, to build a CO2 insights tool for planning least carbon intensive routes.
For electric vehicle drivers the data shows the location and availability of charging stations.
“So if you’re doing these routes that can be incorporated into the delivery schedule to make sure that the vehicles are always fully charged or charged appropriately,” said Jameson.
— Caroline Falls has been contributing to Fleet Auto News since 2015. She is a freelance writer. She can be contacted at carolinefalls@gmail.com
