It is called “FordLiive”, and is in fact an “accelerator” to help those who drive the commercial vehicles of the Blue Oval House to reduce downtime due to breakdowns or other inaccuracies.
The new Ford system is already operational in the United Kingdom and Spain and involves the Transit, Ranger and Fiesta Van ranges: the idea is to network everything about the vehicle using an internal modem that constantly monitors it and sends notifications ( to both the driver and the fleet manager) in the event that maintenance needs to be carried out. Which can mean either topping up the oil or inflating the tires or replacing worn parts that could definitively fail leading to a stop of the vehicle.
Small businesses with up to five vehicles receive notifications via the app, while larger fleet managers are kept informed of the situation through a dedicated version of Ford Telematics. The goal is to reduce costs and downtime of the vehicle by foreseeing more serious and demanding failures, planning any maintenance interventions in advance and carefully.
FordLiive also acts on the workshop side, allowing mechanics to order any necessary parts before the vehicle is delivered for maintenance or repair and to receive specific technical support to speed up the intervention and make it more effective. For the latter task, FordLiive “teleports” engineers via a virtual reality set allowing them to diagnose complex problems and offer effective solutions, saving time and physical travel costs.
To date, approximately 500,000 connected Ford commercial vehicles are already on the road on European roads, a figure that should grow to exceed one million by mid-2022. For the Blue Oval House, in short, prevention is better than cure when deals with logistics and mechanics, especially given the numbers. Using data and information from a popular UK roadside assistance service, Ford engineers estimated that up to 30% of breakdown and roadside assistance calls could be avoided if customers responded to notifications in a timely manner. smart maintenance “.
“Our customers’ businesses stop whenever their vehicles are off the road – said Hans Schep, General Manager Commercial Vehicles Ford of Europe – Combining the benefits of real-time connectivity with our commercial vehicle know-how, FordLiive it is the ideal tool for optimizing uptime “.
To date, FordLiive Center locations include Ford’s Dunton Campus in the UK, which is already closing cases from clients in the UK and Ireland; a second center in Valencia, Spain, serving customers in that market since launch and which will later expand to cover France, Italy and Portugal; and a third center in Cologne, Germany, due to open later this year and serving customers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
