Fleets are buying the wrong telematics

A magnetic GPS tracker bought on Amazon for £35 will last about three months on a single charge, assuming it doesn't fall off the chassis first. Paul Welford, who runs seven vans delivering building supplies, bought half a dozen of them in late 2023 and figured he'd solved the problem of not knowing where his drivers went all day. For about three months, he was right. He could see where the vans were, check they were heading to the right jobs, and pull up location history if a customer disputed a delivery time. He could see where his vans were, check they were heading to the right jobs, and pull up a location history if a customer disputed a delivery time. Then the batteries started going. Two units stopped transmitting within a week of each other, and because they were stuck to the underside of the chassis with magnets, nobody noticed until Welford checked the app and saw two vans hadn't reported a position in four days. He replaced the batteries, lost one unit entirely when it came loose somewhere on the A5, and by summer 2024 had three trackers still working out of the original six. "I spent maybe two hundred pounds on the lot and got about five months of actual use from half of them," he said. "I still don't know where my lads go on Friday afternoons."

Welford's experience is familiar enough that telematics installers around the Midlands in the UK, say they hear some version of it most weeks. Gary Ashton, who runs a vehicle electronics fitting business in Nuneaton, told me he gets three or four calls a month from small operators who bought consumer trackers online and want to know why they stopped working, or why they can't see fuel data, or why the app doesn't connect to anything else they use. "They think tracking is tracking," Ashton said. "They don't realise a £35 magnetic box is basically a phone with a GPS chip and a SIM in it, and that's all it does. It tells you where the van is. Maybe. When the battery's charged." He said most of the small operators he talks to don't know that hardwired devices exist, or that you can pull CAN bus data from a van's diagnostics port, or that a proper telematics platform can flag idling, harsh braking, fuel consumption, and maintenance schedules all from the same dashboard. They bought the cheapest GPS tracker and expected it to solve problems it was never designed to solve.

The small fleet segment is enormous by headcount if not by vehicle numbers. Traffic Commissioner records show that around 85% of standard goods vehicle O-licence holders in Great Britain operate fewer than 10 vehicles. The enterprise telematics companies have never pursued this market with real commitment because the per unit revenue doesn't justify the sales and support effort. Selling a £25 a month per vehicle subscription to someone running four vans means £100 a month in recurring revenue, and after you account for installation, support, and the hardware subsidy most vendors offer to get customers onto the platform, profitability takes a year or more to appear on each account. So the small operators end up buying consumer hardware that does location and nothing else, or they simply don't track at all and manage through phone calls and WhatsApp groups, which is probably still the most common setup for fleets under five vehicles in the UK.

I spoke to a fleet data analyst at GPSWOX who said their platform data suggests operators running fewer than eight vehicles tend to use maybe 15 to 20 percent of available telematics features even when they have access to a full suite, though he added that the figure comes from active platform users and doesn't capture the much larger number of small operators who never adopt a platform at all. The pattern he described was consistent across markets. Small operators install tracking, use the live map view for a few weeks, sometimes pull up route history to check on a driver's movements, and then gradually stop logging in. The maintenance alerts, the fuel reports, the driver scoring, the geofence notifications all go unchecked. Most of them stop using everything except the map after a month or two, which is a complaint I've heard from telematics vendors for years, though it never seems to translate into anyone actually building a simpler product for this segment.

The real gap isn't pricing alone. It's that the products assume a level of operational structure that doesn't exist when the owner is also the dispatcher, also drives one of the vans, and does the invoicing at nine in the evening. A fleet management dashboard built for a transport manager sitting at a desk with two monitors is not going to get used by someone checking their phone between jobs on a building site. What small operators actually want, based on every conversation I've had with them over the past couple of years, is remarkably narrow. They want to know where their vehicles are right now, they want to know if someone's using the van for personal trips on the weekend, and they want something useful when the insurance company asks for telematics data after a claim. Some of the sharper ones want fuel monitoring because they suspect drivers are filling up personal cars on the company fuel card, and a few want maintenance reminders because they've been caught out by a missed MOT or a service interval they forgot. Nobody in this segment is asking for driver scorecards or route optimisation algorithms or API integrations with their TMS, because they don't have a TMS, and they plan routes by knowing which roads are slow on Tuesday mornings.

Ashton told me he's started recommending hardwired OBD devices to his smaller customers instead of the magnetic trackers, even though installation adds £40 to £60 per vehicle, because at least the device stays powered and connected and doesn't end up in a ditch. The conversation usually goes the same way. The operator balks at the cost, Ashton explains that the consumer tracker they already tried actually costs more per month of real use once you factor in dead batteries and lost units, and about half of them go ahead with it. The other half says they'll think about it. The RHA has been pushing for better technology adoption among smaller members for several years now, and a 2024 survey by Logistics UK found that 62 percent of operators with fewer than 10 vehicles had no telematics installed at all, compared to 8 percent of operators running 50 or more. That gap has stayed roughly stable for three years despite hardware getting cheaper, which tells you the barrier was probably never really about price.

Welford got five hardwired trackers fitted by Ashton's team over a weekend in early 2025. He uses the live map, pulls a weekly fuel report, and doesn't touch anything else on the platform. He told me it's probably been worth the money, mostly because he caught a driver doing removals jobs on the side with a company van on Saturdays, though he admitted he's not sure the fuel report is actually showing him anything he couldn't have worked out from the receipts.