Eroad is adopting AI to ensure its business isn’t driven off route by Tesla and other high-tech EV hardware. Video / Carson Bluck
Truck tracking software company ERoad is adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure it doesn’t become irrelevant against high-tech electric vehicles like Tesla.
It’s cut a deal with Microsoft to use its machine learning algorithms to perfect the temperature inside chilled truck trailers carrying food or medicine.
It’s also launched atool that can predict when vehicle maintenance is required.
“Our AI technology knows when a trailer is going to fall over and stop working before it actually happens,” the new co-chief executive Mark Heine told Markets with Madison about its AI use cases.
“And these trailers can have $100,000 worth of goods in them.”
ERoad began as the “godfather” of road user charge devices, he said, having innovated the first recording device approved by the New Zealand Transport Agency / Waka Kotahi.
Its software suite now allowed companies to track drivers, manage their behaviour, vehicle performance and safety, and pay road user charges and road tolls.
It’s had a messy time on the market, after a killed takeover offer last year, $50m equity raise and its founder Steven Newman resigning and then returning.
But Heine said the opportunities AI brought to the transport industry, and its company, were massive.
“There’s no point having AI without actually having an end result for customers.
“AI can get really expensive if you don’t know how to do it well, so you need to have an economic reason for doing so.”
ERoad co-chief executives Mark Heine and David Kenneson.
It also allowed ERoad to increase its prices. It just passed through a 6 per cent hike in New Zealand.
“Look, people are willing to take them, it’s the first price increase ERoad has ever done in 10 to 11 years.”
It was also benefitting from more corporate fleets shifting to electric vehicles, which would be subject to fuel road user charges from April 1.
“It’s great to see the Government looking at doing road charging more generally because we do believe it’s a more equitable model for the country.”
But, with electric vehicles like Tesla likely to have high-tech software that automatically organised charges and tolls, and managed vehicle performance, could ERoad be at risk of becoming irrelevant?
Watch Mark Heine discuss its future and valuation in today’s episode of Markets with Madison above.
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Madison Reidy is the host of the NZ Herald’s investment show Markets with Madison. She joined the Herald in 2022 after working in investment, and has covered business and economics for television and radio broadcasters.
