The world’s first telematics system for in-production electric vehicles
IT technology developed for banks and telecoms companies is playing a key role in the world’s first telematics system for production electric vehicles.
In fleets of conventional diesel or petrol-powered vehicles, telematics is used primarily as a vehicle tracking device. Because EVs have much more sophisticated vehicle management systems, fleet managers can use telematics to monitor additional elements like battery charge. Telemetry can also monitor battery performance down to individual cells, ensuring any potential issues are quickly identified and fixed.
When Smith Electric Vehicles began designing its Smith Telemetry system, it realised the huge volume of data signals generated by each vehicle would require either massive investment in servers, or third party support.
Smith Telemetry is the world’s first telematics system for in-production electric vehicles; StormMQ’s cloud-based message queue technology allows Smith Electric Vehicles to collect 27,500 messages a second from clients’ EVs.
StormMQ’s machine-to-machine message queuing was designed for banks and finance houses, as a secure method of collating and conveying highly confidential data. It works by storing the data in a ‘cloud’ and releasing it in a steady stream, so that the recipient’s server does not get overloaded.
The same StormMQ technology now allows Smith Telemetry to collect 27,500 messages a second, delivering them on a managed basis to the Smith server. StormMQ was awarded the contract based on affordability, scalability and ease of implementation. It is now in operation for Smith Electric Vehicles in both the UK and the USA.
“The sheer volume of messages was a significant issue for us, along with the requirement to rapidly scale up, as we roll out more vehicles to customers around the world. To develop and run our own multi-server messaging queue in-house would have been extremely expensive – and we would still need to expand it in subsequent years, as our business is growing very quickly. We estimate that StormMQ has cost us around a tenth of any comparable system we looked at and delivers us a fixed monthly cost per vehicle which decreases as our fleet grows. As a pioneer in our respective field, it’s rare that you see another service that is so revolutionary yet simple; that can help us deliver a major benefit to our clients; and that would have either have been almost impossible to achieve any other way,” commented Robin Mackie, Chief Technical Officer of Smith Electric Vehicles US Corporation.
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