Andrew DeBolt, the lead equipment mechanic for San Jose Unified School District in California, said all of his district’s 101 school buses are equipped with a Geotab vehicle tracking device. The devices were installed about a year ago. Since then, he’s been in the process of refining the noti- fications the mechanics receive. He said the system sends a lot of emails and without setting parameters, one could get upwards of 300 notifications a day on different vehicle updates. However, he’s been narrowing it down and setting notifications for reports that are important to the vehicle health, such as a “check engine” light on a school bus. “There’s a lot of data,” DeBolt noted. “The nice thing about it for us, and
how we’ve utilized it the most, is the driver will notice the check engine light is on, and I will have already gotten the notification, and I can go into the system and say yes or no, you’re ok to keep driving.” He added this is especially helpful when a driver is on a field or activity
trip and they no longer need to guess whether or not they will make it back without breaking down. DeBolt added that the vehicle itself has a cellular connection, which is how it sends information to the server, and he ac- cesses it on his iPad via Wi-Fi, so he must be in the building or on Wi-Fi to get the notifications. DeBolt added that the San Jose Unified was also in the process of in-
stalling the software on its 115 white fleet vehicles, three of which are electric-battery powered. He noted that Geotab integrates well into electric vehicles, and he advised other districts to ensure that the vehicle telemat- ics software they use has easy integration for all vehicle types, so that they don’t have to run two systems. He said he is looking forward to seeing what the notifications will look like for the electric vehicles through Geotab. Addressing the transition to electric vehicles, Transfinder’s Civitella and
Moren both noted that while there are fewer moving parts than a diesel engine, there is still a lot of information the vehicle needs to report back on, such as charge status.
Communicating Vehicle Health on Electric Bryant Maxey, senior product marketing specialist for Zonar Systems,
added that electric buses have fewer moving parts, but with any new tech- nology comes new problems. “One very important difference with electric buses is what is the charge level of the battery or battery level,” he said. “It is commonly referred to as State of Charge (SoC) percent. Zonar is able to capture that new EV signal from the bus and display it [in] real time in our fleet management platform, Ground Traffic Control.” Maxey added that Ground Traffic Control will help fleet managers increase
Charger Communications
Gregg Kresge, the senior manager for utility engagement and transportation electrification for the World Resources Institute, noted that when setting up charging infrastructure, it’s important to determine if the chargers are going to communicate via Wi-Fi or cellular, and if there is adequate bandwidth at the location to communicate with either. He noted that if communication is lost, depending on the charger, the bus could stop charging. This could be as simple as someone unplugging the router by accident or changing the password. Read more about how communications play a role in electric school bus charging at
stnonline.com/go/fc.
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