Plug & play telematic system for electric vehicles
Magtec, United Kingdom
Strengthening the electric fleet offering with telematics
Owasys owa450A+ (LTE, GNSS, 9-axis IMU)
The problem
Founded in 1992, Magtec designs, manufactures, installs and repowers electric drive systems for a wide range of vehicles: heavy goods vehicles, buses, wheeled and tracked defence vehicles, and bespoke specialist vehicles. The company is a major force in the UK supply chain for commercial vehicle electrification.
To strengthen its electric fleet offering, Magtec needed to integrate a telematics system able to connect to any CAN network, with no prior configuration, and to give its customers simple access to their vehicle data.
The solution
Owasys and Magtec have collaborated since 2020 on designing and integrating a telematics system dedicated to electric vehicles. The system is designed to be agnostic and versatile: it connects plug-and-play to any CAN network and starts logging as soon as it is connected.
1. The owa450 on-board unit
The central component is an owa450 in its LTE version, equipped with two CAN inputs to capture data from various sources — GPS and CAN devices adhering to the J1939 or CANopen protocols. The system ensures “all the data, all the time”: if cellular coverage is lost, a buffering mechanism stores the data until connectivity is restored.
2. Two portals for the data
The collected data is transmitted to a cloud service for storage and processing, then made available through two complementary portals: Grafana, for technical analysis and detailed visualization, and the EV Portal, intended for customers, which presents vehicle location, usage and energy consumption in an accessible way.
“The Owasys software libraries provide a solid foundation for our platform: they let us focus our development on our own approach to data acquisition. The tried and tested owa450 hardware gives us the confidence we need to ensure the continued reliability of our telematic system.”
The result
Magtec's customers gain easy access to their vehicle data and understand how the vehicles actually behave. The data is captured with no sub-sampling and no interpolation, and can therefore be used to train machine learning models. Both companies are working to enrich the solution, notably with AI techniques for preventative maintenance and an improved aftermarket service.
