Fitting a tracker is not the hard part, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The question worth asking is what happens over the following two years — and that answer changes completely somewhere between your fifth truck and your fiftieth.
Search this question and you will mostly find device makers. That is not a conspiracy, it is just economics: a company selling a plug-in tracker wins when installation costs nothing, so “$0 install” is a feature on their pricing page. They are right that the plugging-in part is easy. They are quiet about everything after it, because after it is not their department.
We are on the other side of that. We install across every major platform and we are brand agnostic, so we have no reason to talk you into a particular device — and no reason to pretend the install is harder than it is. Here is the honest version.
Take the install line to zero and you have saved a real amount of money on day one. Fair enough. But the quote is only counting one of four things you will spend:
A dead unit is the easy case. It stops reporting, somebody notices within a day, it gets fixed.
The costly ones do not behave like that. A device wired to a circuit that never sleeps will sit there drawing current until a truck that stood over a long weekend will not start on Monday — and that gets put down to the battery, not the install. An auxiliary input landed on the wrong wire reports clean, consistent, entirely wrong data. The dashboard looks tidy. The export runs without an error. It is simply describing a work light instead of the PTO, and fleets have run on that for a year without noticing, because there is no alert for confidently wrong.
Zonar — a telematics manufacturer, not an installer — lists the same risks from its own side: incompatible devices that cannot deliver reliable data, vehicle damage from lack of hardware expertise, and improper electrical connections creating fire hazards. When the people selling the device say that out loud, it is worth reading twice.
One truck, in your own yard, on a Tuesday with nothing else on: manageable.
Forty trucks that all have to keep working, spread across several yards, with a go-live date: that is a scheduling problem long before it is a wiring problem. Which units come off the road, in what order, on which days, so the work you have booked still gets done. That is the part that quietly turns a two-week plan into a two-month one, and it is not because the wiring got harder.
For reference, with units staged and ready we put away 40 to 50 vehicles in a day. Not because we are faster with a crimp tool, but because the sequencing is the job and we have done it 11,000 times.
Ask a fleet running self-installed hardware what is fitted to unit 47, when, by whom, and what the serial is. The honest answer is usually a spreadsheet somebody stopped updating.
Every vehicle we touch gets a record: asset ID, serial, VIN, install type, date, technician and photographs. It sounds like paperwork until a truck gets sold, a device gets swapped, a platform gets migrated, or a claim needs evidence — and then it is the whole ballgame. That record is also what makes a future migration cheap instead of a rediscovery exercise.
If you have a couple of vehicles, a plug-in device and no complications, you do not need a lecture from us about it.
Where it is worth getting help is when any of these are true: the fleet is big enough that scheduling is the real constraint, the vehicles are work trucks with upfitted bodies or auxiliary inputs, the hardware needs to be hidden or hardwired rather than plugged in, you are migrating platforms and cannot afford a gap, or you need documentation that will still make sense in three years.
That is not a sales position. It is just where the money actually is.
On the quote, yes - the install line goes to zero. Whether it is cheaper overall depends on what happens next: how many units report correctly the first time, how much of your staff's week it consumes, and whether anyone can tell you two years later what was fitted to which truck. Those costs are real, they just do not appear on the quote.
Rarely a dead device - those announce themselves. The expensive ones are quiet: a unit wired to a circuit that never sleeps and flattens a battery over a long weekend, or an auxiliary input on the wrong wire that reports clean, consistent, entirely wrong data. Nothing looks broken, so nobody looks.
It is less about a number and more about what happens on the day. One truck at a time in your own yard is one thing. Forty trucks that all have to keep working, across several yards, on a deadline, is a scheduling job before it is a wiring job. That is usually where in-house plans start stretching - not because the work is hard, but because the trucks are needed.
Less than people expect. What changes it is the vehicle. A car or van is straightforward. A work truck with an upfitted body, a PTO, auxiliary inputs or multiplexed wiring is a different job entirely, and that is true whichever platform you bought.
A record for every vehicle: asset ID, serial, VIN, install type, date, technician and photographs. That is the part almost nobody replicates in-house, and it is the part you need when a truck is sold, a device is swapped, or somebody asks what is on unit 47.
That is normal. We are brand agnostic, so there is nothing we are steering you toward. Our job is that it works, that it reports what you think it reports, and that you can prove what was done.
GPS, cameras and telematics across GA, SC & NC — at your yard, documented per vehicle, scheduled around your crews.