Imagine being able to locate one motor vehicle out of 500,000 in a matter of seconds. The following use case is a textbook IoT deployment that does exactly this. Manheim is currently utilizing the IoT to gain visibility and be able to automate management of its vehicles while they are still on the sales lot. Manheim is an automobile action company that operates 80 locations across the United States and 120 locations internationally. In an average year they sell approximately seven million cars. This means that at any one time they could have as many as a half million vehicles on their lots. The company first piloted this solution last year at one of their lots in West Palm Beach, Florida. Today they are deploying this system across all of their North American lots. The technology that comprises the application consists of battery-powered sensor devices assigned to each vehicle that transmit a unique ID via a LPWAN. Gateway receivers are installed throughout each of the locations. The system collects the data on a cloud-based server and detects the location of each device. It then matches that information with the vehicle’s VIN number, make and model. The benefits and the ROI of this project are proving to be quite significant.
Automobile auctioneering company Manheim is using a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN)-based Internet of Things (IoT) system developed by its sister company, Cox Communications, (both owned by Atlanta-based Cox enterprises), to track up to 500,000 vehicles at car lots across North America. The new solution, known as Cox2M, is designed for asset management across multiple industries, but is initially being launched with the company’s automotive division to help track vehicles as they are received, processed, test-driven and sold in large lots. Cox Communications calls this the largest LPWAN commercial IoT deployment in North America.
