Telematics without CAN: Powerstar’s smart solution for Euro 2 trucks
Telematics without CAN: Powerstar’s smart solution for Euro 2 trucks
What if a Euro 2 truck could think like a far more sophisticated machine? CHARLEEN CLARKE discovers that Powerstar’s PowerTech is doing exactly that – bringing real-time intelligence to everyday fleet operations today.
Vehicle tracking has become almost routine in South African road transport. Knowing where a truck is, however, is only one small part of knowing what is happening to it. Powerstar believes the next step is to bring together location, vehicle condition, driver behaviour, fuel information and maintenance data in a single fleet-management environment.
Its answer is PowerTech, a fleet-management system developed by Khulu Digital for Powerstar and fitted at OEM level on the production line at the company’s Pietermaritzburg plant. Factory installation began in February 2025.
Mike Hawkins, senior head: national vehicle sales at Ever Star Industries, says the decision was driven by operators’ increasing demand for more information from their vehicles. “In this highly competitive environment, modern fleet owners are looking for value propositions that will drive profitability,” he explains. “Value is not found in pricing only. It is also in additional features that can help the end user make smarter decisions, faster.”
The unusual part is not simply that Powerstar has a telematics system. It is how PowerTech extracts information from vehicles that do not have the electronic architecture typically associated with modern telematics.
Connecting a Euro 2 truck
Conventional telematics platforms commonly obtain large amounts of vehicle information through the CAN bus. That presents a problem when the truck in question was intentionally designed without the sophisticated electronic architecture found in newer-generation vehicles.
Powerstar’s Euro 2 trucks have no native electronic control unit (ECU) from which a conventional system can harvest the required information. Hence, PowerTech approaches the issue differently. “PowerTech does not read from a CAN bus,” Hawkins explains. “The Euro 2 trucks were designed to carry no telemetry-enabled electronics at all and have no native ECU to read from.”
Instead, Powerstar fits what Hawkins describes as a snap-on ECU that reads the truck’s existing factory sensors directly. “No additional sensors are installed on the vehicle,” he says. “It is rather like a smartwatch reading the body without altering anything about it. The engineering that makes this possible is locally developed – something we are quite proud of.”
The data travels from the truck’s native sensors to the additional ECU, then through a GPS modem and cellular network to the PowerTech platform. Each vehicle uses dual SIMs to improve redundancy and cross-border connectivity. This effectively gives Powerstar a common digital environment across vehicles with very different levels of underlying electronic sophistication.
What the fleet manager sees
Once connected, PowerTech provides the fleet operator with a live view of the truck’s operating information. The vehicle appears on a map along with its ignition status, while dashboard parameters can be viewed through the platform. Operators can configure notifications and alerts around sensor readings and OEM operating ranges.
Retrospective reporting goes further. PowerTech produces geo-zone reports, fuel reports, trip and parking reports and reports identifying sensors operating outside expected parameters. Reports can either be requested manually or scheduled automatically. “There is a standard set of reports that comes with the product,” Hawkins elaborates. “Upgraded packages can add further reports and custom dashboards built to the client’s requirements.”
For operators already drowning in fleet data, the distinction is important. Collecting data is relatively easy; identifying something useful in it is considerably harder. “The objective is to convert operational information into management insight, rather than simply collecting historical data,” says Hawkins.
Watching the truck’s vital signs
PowerTech monitors a sizeable list of vehicle parameters, including coolant temperature, oil pressure, fuel level, engine speed, dashboard speed, odometer readings, battery voltage and ignition status. It also monitors air tanks one and two and the status of the engine protection unit (EPU), while engine hours are calculated from the available data. These inputs give fleet managers a view of vehicle condition without waiting for the driver to report that something feels wrong.
Custom reports can carry warning and critical thresholds, meaning the operator can be alerted as a reading approaches a limit, rather than only after the situation becomes serious. If a monitored reading moves outside OEM specification, the EPU can limit the truck to 12km/h. Crucially for trucks operating in remote areas, this protection does not depend on a cellular connection.
“The EPU works independently of connectivity,” says Hawkins. “The driver sees the dashboard warning at the same time as the fleet manager sees the problem through the system, but the vehicle protection itself does not depend on the truck being in coverage.” That could be particularly relevant in Southern African operations, where poor cellular coverage remains a reality on some routes.
Looking at the person behind the wheel
The same data can also reveal how the truck is being driven. PowerTech reports events including harsh braking, harsh acceleration, harsh cornering, speeding, over-revving, coasting and excessive idling. But Hawkins stresses that an alert should not automatically become a verdict on the driver. “PowerTech is designed to support informed management decisions, rather than making automatic judgements,” he explains. “Operational events should always be assessed within their context.”
That distinction matters. A harsh-braking event could indicate poor driving, but it could equally have been caused by another motorist pulling into the truck’s path. Traffic, terrain, load, road conditions and emergencies can all change what apparently undesirable driving data actually means. “The platform provides information and supporting evidence. Management remains responsible for interpreting that information fairly,” Hawkins emphasises.
The standard system operates according to thresholds and does not automatically make all these contextual distinctions. More advanced comparisons can be developed through customised dashboards, while operators can also analyse the underlying raw data themselves.
Coaching rather than policing
That creates another question for fleet managers: should telematics be used primarily to catch drivers doing something wrong? Hawkins argues that it is more valuable as a coaching tool. “We monitor driver behaviour across several fronts and deliver it back in reports,” he says. “Those reports are what make the coaching conversation possible.”
Instead of simply telling a driver that excessive idling or repeated harsh braking is unacceptable, the operator can show what has happened and explain its potential effect on the vehicle. “That turns the data into something a driver can act on,” says Hawkins. “Patterns become visible over time, suggestions can be made against them, and improvement can then be seen in subsequent reports.”
He also believes the flow of information should work in both directions. “Drivers give feedback on what they are seeing and feeling on the road. That context should sit alongside the data rather than being overridden by it.” This becomes especially important when operators compare drivers on different routes. A simple ranking can be misleading when one driver spends the week on flat highways while another has to contend with congested urban deliveries, steep gradients or badly maintained roads.
Fuel under the microscope
Fuel remains one of the most important variables in any truck fleet, both because of its cost and its vulnerability to wastage and theft. PowerTech combines fuel information with factors including engine speed, idling, route conditions, terrain and vehicle utilisation. “Each truck leaves the production line with what we call the standard sensor set, which includes fuel-level monitoring,” Hawkins explains. “Against that, we run rules that identify scenarios that can drive up consumption – particularly idling, speeding and over-revving.”
Potential fuel losses can also be investigated, although the way the system works is worth understanding. The truck’s own fuel sensor is powered when the ignition is switched on. This means that fuel removed while a parked truck is switched off is not necessarily recorded at the moment it disappears – the discrepancy becomes apparent when the ignition is switched on again.
“If the last reading before shutdown was 100 litres and the first reading on restart is 30 litres, then 70 litres are unaccounted for,” Hawkins explains. “The same principle applies in reverse when fuel is added.” The precision of that information ultimately depends on the accuracy of the OEM fuel probe installed in the vehicle.
Not quite predictive maintenance – yet
Connected vehicles are increasingly associated with predictive maintenance, but Hawkins is careful not to suggest that the standard PowerTech package can predict every failure before it happens. It can, however, identify sensor values moving towards critical thresholds, track kilometres and engine hours, and support maintenance planning according to Powerstar service requirements.
Pattern detection sophisticated enough to predict fatigue or sustained vehicle abuse, on the other hand, falls outside the standard offering and would require additional development or analysis. The potential lies in accumulating enough data to identify patterns that are not immediately obvious. “Big data is valuable,” Hawkins says. “Gathering large amounts of raw information about engine sensor readings is exactly what data analytics needs to gain more nuanced insight into the factors that drive mechanical failure.”
In time, anonymised information from multiple examples of the same model may help algorithms identify combinations of conditions that tend to precede a problem. That’s where Hawkins sees scope for the platform to evolve.
What happens beyond the signal?
Connectivity is an obvious concern in African trucking. When a PowerTech-equipped truck loses cellular coverage, its data is stored locally and uploaded when the connection returns. If the vehicle remains disconnected long enough to fill its available buffer, the oldest stored information is eventually overwritten.
Dual SIMs provide redundancy and support cross-border operation, with Hawkins saying coverage is available in most African countries. Cross-border data, however, is not unlimited. Operators discuss their routes during onboarding so that appropriate settings can be configured. Hawkins points out that roaming data can be considerably more expensive and intensive international users may need to buy additional data.
None of this affects the engine protection unit or speed limiting, because those functions operate on the vehicle itself rather than relying on a live data connection.
Built-in speed management
PowerTech also incorporates a speed-limiting function. According to Hawkins, the system is configured around the national 80km/h truck speed limit, with approximately 5km/h of latitude to enable overtaking. Importantly, he says, the technology does not govern speed by abruptly starving the engine of fuel or cutting the ignition. “The truck drives normally. It simply will not exceed the limit,” he explains.
Alongside the limiter, speeding reports, geo-zones, trip records and parking information can give an operator an evidence trail for monitoring route adherence and internal fleet policies. The system cannot ensure good fleet governance by itself, but it can make certain forms of non-compliance considerably more visible.
Who owns the information?
The more data collected by fleets, the more important questions of privacy and access become. PowerTech allows customers to determine who may access their fleet information, with controlled access and defined user permissions. Hawkins says information must be handled in accordance with POPIA and the customer’s own governance requirements. “Access should always be limited to authorised personnel with legitimate operational responsibilities,” he stresses. Ever Star Industries also declines to publish customer-specific operating data or claimed savings without permission.
Hawkins says PowerTech has been used to investigate suspected fuel theft, abnormal operating conditions and overheating incidents, but the company does not disclose customer identities or measurable results without explicit approval. That makes it difficult to independently quantify how much money PowerTech is saving fleets at this stage, but it also avoids the questionable practice of presenting selected customer information as universal proof.
A platform rather than a finished product
Perhaps the most significant aspect of PowerTech is that Powerstar does not regard it as complete. The underlying platform can already accommodate cameras, Bluetooth tags, flow sensors, fuel-monitoring equipment, stationary tank monitors, temperature sensors and weight sensors. Some customers are already using cameras and additional sensor technology.
Future possibilities include AI-enabled cameras, more sophisticated fuel monitoring, load sensing and increasingly advanced data analysis. “PowerTech was intentionally designed as an expandable platform rather than a closed telematics product,” Hawkins notes. “Our approach is client-led. The platform is built to take additional sensor types, and we develop with operators according to what they actually need from the data.”
For South African fleets, that may ultimately be the more interesting part of the PowerTech story. Telematics itself is nothing new. What is unusual is applying connected-fleet thinking to a deliberately simple Euro 2 truck without fundamentally changing the vehicle architecture that attracted customers to it in the first place. Powerstar has effectively added a digital layer to a mechanically straightforward truck.
Whether operators use that layer simply to track vehicles or to turn its growing stream of information into lower costs, safer driving and better maintenance decisions will depend as much on fleet management as it does on the technology itself.
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