Ford Tracks Van and Truck Data To Warn Customers On Costly Repairs; Likely To Launch Subscription Service In Europe, US

Ford Motor Co's F wants to exploit reams of data from its vans and trucks to tap more customers in the European and U.S. commercial vehicle market.
Ford has a 9-meter-long (30 ft) screen at its U.K. headquarters in Dunton, east of London that displays the vast data it tracks.
The screen showed real-time data from 114,000 vans in Britain so far covered by Ford's FORDLiive monthly subscription service, Reuters reports.
Ford employees focused on 98.3% of the vans in service. Of those, roughly 8% needed repairs fairly soon or urgently but concentrated even more on the 1.7% of vehicles out of action.
Ford tracks 4,000 data points via modems to warn against brake pad wear and low oil or diesel additives, which are costly to fix if not taken care of in advance.
Ford connected all of its U.K. dealers to its system, so it could arrange repairs and have parts ready for vans before they arrived at a dealership.
Ford is also launching the FORDLiive service in mainland Europe and the U.S. The automaker has focused more on its profitable Ford Pro business in Europe than on lower-margin mass-market passenger cars.
Hans Schep, European head of Ford Pro, the company's commercial vehicle business, said it is already close to hitting long-term targets of increasing vehicle "uptime" by up to 60%. Ford estimates downtime costs 600 pounds ($724) daily per van.
The U.K. operations of DHL Express, part of the Deutsche Post DHL Group, has 270 electric Ford E Transit vans with firm orders for 120 more and is signing up for FORDLiive. Fleet director Richard Crook said that besides monitoring those vans' batteries, he wants to tap Ford's predictive maintenance capabilities.
Price Action: F shares traded higher by 0.08% at $13.09 premarket on the last check Monday.

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