GPS tracking brought visibility to Indian fleets, but rising costs and thin margins demand more. The next competitive edge lies in understanding vehicle behaviour, predicting failures, and converting operational data into decisions that actually improve profitability.
31 Jan 2026 | 355 Views | By Pali Tripathi, Taabi Mobility
A large fleet operator in North India runs several hundred trucks across highways, mines, and industrial corridors. Like most organised fleets today, every vehicle is GPS enabled. Locations are visible, routes are mapped, and reports are generated weekly.
Yet the business is under pressure.
Fuel costs continue to ...
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A large fleet operator in North India runs several hundred trucks across highways, mines, and industrial corridors. Like most organised fleets today, every vehicle is GPS enabled. Locations are visible, routes are mapped, and reports are generated weekly.
Yet the business is under pressure.
Fuel costs continue to rise. Breakdowns still occur mid route. Delivery commitments slip. Drivers complain of unrealistic expectations. And every quarter, the same question comes up internally.
“We have had GPS for years. Why are operating costs not coming down?”
This question is increasingly being asked across India’s commercial vehicle ecosystem, and it points to a deeper shift underway in how fleet technology is being understood.
The GPS plateau
For over a decade, GPS tracking defined what it meant for fleets to be connected. In the Indian context, this was a major step forward. Tracking helped reduce theft, curb route deviation, and bring basic discipline to fleet operations.
But today, GPS alone is no longer improving profitability.
The biggest challenges Indian fleets face now are different. Volatile fuel prices. Thin operating margins. Driver shortages. Higher expectations around safety, uptime, and compliance. Assets operating across vastly different environments such as highways, cities, construction sites, and mines.
GPS answers a narrow question. Where is the vehicle?
It does not explain why identical vehicles show 20 to 25 percent variation in fuel efficiency. Why breakdowns cluster after certain duty cycles. Why tyres, brakes, or clutches wear faster in specific operations. Or why the same route behaves very differently across seasons.
Visibility, in other words, has reached its limit. The next gains lie in understanding how vehicles are being operated, not just where they are.
An enterprise blind spot
This limitation becomes even clearer in large enterprises running captive or semi captive logistics.
In one such case, an enterprise believed its primary problem was route delays. A closer look revealed something else entirely. Excessive idling at plant entry points. Poor load distribution stressing suspension systems. Aggressive driving on short stretches wiping out fuel efficiency gains elsewhere.
None of this was visible in GPS dashboards.
The solution was not more monitoring. It was redesigning operating conditions. That shift from tracking movement to understanding behaviour is what many Indian fleets are now beginning to recognise.
Predictive maintenance moves centre stage
Another area where GPS has clear limitations is maintenance.
Most Indian fleets still operate reactively. Vehicles are serviced after breakdowns or on fixed schedules that do not reflect how hard an asset is actually being used. This leads to higher downtime, avoidable failures, and rising maintenance costs.
OBD based diagnostics are beginning to change this.
By continuously monitoring engine parameters, fault codes, temperature patterns, and operating stress, fleets can now detect early warning signs of failure. Issues such as injector degradation, abnormal engine load, or overheating can be flagged well before they result in roadside breakdowns.
For fleets operating in remote locations or on tight delivery schedules, this shift from reactive to predictive maintenance can make a material difference. Uptime improves. Workshop visits become planned rather than disruptive. Parts are replaced based on condition rather than guesswork.
For OEMs, this also opens the door to lower warranty costs and more data backed service strategies in real Indian operating conditions.
The India cost problem
India’s logistics costs are estimated at 13 to 14 percent of GDP, significantly higher than global benchmarks. Infrastructure gaps play a role, but a large portion of the problem lies inside daily operations.
Time lost at loading points. Fuel burned while idling. Maintenance done too late or too early. Assets used harder than they were designed for.
These are non balance sheet losses. They are difficult to see, harder to measure, and devastating at scale. Traditional GPS systems were never designed to surface them.
As fleet sizes grow and margins tighten, these hidden inefficiencies matter more than ever.
What this means for OEMs?
For commercial vehicle OEMs, this shift has important implications.
Fleet buyers are no longer evaluating vehicles only on upfront cost, payload, or brochure mileage. Increasingly, they are asking tougher questions. What will my cost per kilometre look like over five years. How predictable is downtime. Can efficiency and safety claims be validated in real Indian conditions. How easily does vehicle data integrate with my operational systems.
Vehicles are being judged not just as mechanical products, but as long term operating assets supported by intelligence.
OEMs that enable deeper analytics, either natively or through open ecosystems, stand to reduce warranty costs, improve service outcomes, and differentiate on lifetime value rather than specifications alone.
Safety as support, not surveillance
Indian drivers operate under immense pressure. Long hours. Unpredictable roads. Tight delivery schedules. Pure surveillance often creates resistance and fatigue. Predictive and context aware systems, by contrast, can act as on road assistants. Flagging fatigue risk, unsafe driving patterns, or route specific hazards before incidents occur.
In a market facing chronic driver shortages, technology that improves working conditions rather than simply enforcing compliance becomes a genuine advantage.
The quiet shift underway
Across India’s logistics, construction, and enterprise fleets, a quiet shift is underway. The conversation is moving from tracking vehicles to running operations better.
GPS is not going away. It remains essential. But on its own, it is no longer sufficient.
The real value now lies in platforms that combine vehicle health, energy use, driving behaviour, and operating context, and translate that data into decisions fleet operators can act on.
Several Indian companies working closely with large fleets are seeing a consistent pattern. Once operators move beyond location data, they uncover inefficiencies they did not even know existed.
That insight, more than any dashboard, is what ultimately improves margins.
As commercial mobility in India evolves towards higher utilisation, alternative fuels, and stricter safety norms, the fleets and OEMs that succeed will be those that look beyond GPS and treat analytics not as an add on, but as core operational infrastructure.
Pali Tripathi is the CEO of Taabi Mobility. Views expressed are the authors’ personal.