The Benefits of Geofence Alerts
In a previous blog, we discussed the best ways to manage your electric vehicle fleet. Included in this list, was the suggestion to utilize geofence alerts. When managing an EV fleet, your electric vehicles are the most valuable assets to your business. Therefore, it’s important to monitor where they are being driven, especially if you’re renting the vehicles out to other drivers.
Cars can often be difficult to retrieve, should a renter of the vehicle take it outside state lines without the owner realizing. Being able to set up geofence boundaries and be notified when the car is leaving a certain area is a great and immediate indicator to fleet operators that your car may be in danger, and to take necessary actions to ensure the safety of the vehicle.
So, what exactly is a geofence alert and how does it work? With so much software and information available for EV fleets, it can become overwhelming to decipher the details of each aspect of an EV fleet management tool. Standard Fleet is here to provide you with background and insight regarding geofence alerts.
What is a geofence?
The first, most important, question to answer is, what exactly is a geofence? Geofencing is used across a variety of industries, not just the EV industry. By definition, a geofence is a “virtual geographic boundary, defined by GPS or RFID technology that enables software to trigger a response when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area.”
The most common instance in which you may have experienced geofencing in your everyday life is through geofence marketing. Many brands have taken advantage of the specific targeting that geofencing allows. For example, if you’ve previously joined a retailer’s SMS list, the geofence boundaries that retailer has set up may prompt an SMS message promoting shopping coupons as you walk by. The GPS software in your phone has recognized that you’ve entered the retailer’s predetermined geofencing boundaries when you walked by the store, which triggered the SMS notification response.
How does Standard Fleet utilize geofencing?
But, how does this translate into the EV fleet industry? When utilizing EV fleet management software for your electric vehicles, geofencing allows you to define virtual boundaries that trigger a certain alert or notification when the vehicle enters or leaves that area. At Standard Fleet, we offer geofencing alerts for Turo and Getaround fleets, electric car rentals, business fleets and delivery fleets. Utilizing the geofence alert option will allow you, as the fleet manager, to know when something is happening with your vehicle outside of a predetermined “allowed” area.
How will these alerts work in the Standard Fleet software?
If you’re wondering how exactly this feature will work in Standard Fleet’s software, look to our consumer app Nikola, as a great example. In the app, you will be able to set a geofence of a certain amount of miles around a location. After setting this virtual fence, you can choose to have a notification sent to you when the car leaves or arrives in that area — or both, for added peace of mind! Additionally, geofencing allows you to keep track of EVs in your personal life as well by notifying you when a car has left the house, arrived at work, returned home, and more.
What are the benefits of geofence alerts?
This brings us to our final question: why bother setting up geofence alerts in the first place? Implementing geofence boundaries is especially useful for those who are worried about their EVs leaving a particular area, crossing state or country borders, and more. When managing a fleet of numerous vehicles and drivers, keeping track of your vehicles’ whereabouts throughout the day is extremely necessary, but oftentimes tedious. Geofencing replaces the need for actively monitoring the car with the automated notification alerts. With geofencing, you have the option to set up alerts on both a broad scale and for extremely dialed-in locations. For example, if you want to know if an EV has arrived at a drop-off location or taken to a specific car wash or charger location, you can set a small geofence around that area as well. So, rather than constantly checking where your vehicle is, you are automatically alerted only when it is necessary to do so.
In the future, the goal is to implement geofences with the intention of having your EV automatically respond in very specific ways upon entering that area. For example, when your EV enters the geofence determined for your home, it will automatically respond and switch off sentry mode, or leave the car unlocked. The possibilities with geofencing are seemingly endless and we expect the functionality will continue to grow and evolve as the industry does.
