Ford’s commercial vehicle business is betting on the future being defined by data and software.
To that end, Ford Pro recently reported a more than 40% increase since 2023 in the number of connected commercial vehicles its customers have on the road, to 5.2 million. Executives view connectivity as an opportunity to help commercial customers manage the transition to EVs, boost uptime, reduce costs, and use data-driven insights to better manage their fleets.
And such capabilities present opportunities to generate new revenue streams from a business that already plays an outsize role in Ford’s financials: Last year, Ford Pro generated $9 billion in earnings, posted a 13.5% margin, and saw revenue grow 15% YoY to nearly $67 billion. The business unit’s paid software subscriptions jumped 27% to nearly 650,000 subscribers.
“Going from descriptive to prescriptive is the next phase of connected vehicles,” Dave Prusinski, chief revenue officer for Ford Pro Integrated Services, told Tech Brew, “and that’s where Ford is going very, very quickly.”
New capabilities: Later this year, Ford Pro will debut a slate of new features enabled by connectivity, including one that allows “fleet managers to remotely set a maximum speed limit on their fleet vehicles,” an acceleration limiter that would give fleet managers “remote access to control vehicle acceleration,” and “fleet start inhibit” to help prevent theft.
Ford’s commercial customers already can take advantage of an in-vehicle coaching tool, which the automaker claims has led to “52% lower average excessive idle minutes per trip,” a 25% reduction in speeding, and 73% fewer driver seatbelt violations.
According to the company, 20% of fleets have three or more vehicles stolen each year, costing up to $50,000 each time. And fleet drivers have an average of 4.5 accidents annually.
“In the old world, you used to be able to say where a vehicle was, what a vehicle was doing, and what happened at a certain period in time,” Prusinski said. “We have command and control over the vehicles now. If I’m a fleet manager, I now have a secure tunnel into my vehicle at the code level that allows me to control the speed.”
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These types of features are particularly helpful for the many small fleets that Ford Pro serves, he said, because they have less flexibility than large fleets.
“Downtime is incredibly expensive,” Prusinski said. “It’s not about the vehicle being off the road, it’s the fact that the vehicle is not earning money for the day.”
Going electric: Ford Pro has rolled out numerous initiatives to help fleet customers navigate the transition to EVs––like E-Switch Assist, which helps fleet managers pencil out the case for going electric.
“Tie that into our overall intelligence and telematics platform,” Prusinski said. “EVs bring an entire new paradigm of opportunities and issues.”
For example, he said, an employee might take their electric work truck home and forget to plug it in. Ford’s platform can send them reminders. It can automatically precondition the vehicle’s battery. And it can reimburse employees for at-home charging. Features like in-cabin coaching are particularly relevant for EVs, Prusinski noted, because battery range is affected by factors like braking and speed.
Bottom line: These new capabilities unlock new streams of recurring revenue––and help keep customers within Ford Pro’s ecosystem.
“The old world was what you saw, and now the new world is what you control,” Prusinski said. “And that is a paradigm the industry is going to have to start to really understand, because it’s an incredibly powerful tool set that’s going to change the way fleets operate.”