Had an interesting trip to California last week, where Daimler Trucks North America and Zonar had a coming out party of sorts, following the former’s significant investment in the latter. DTNA has taken on a minority ownership stake in Zonar and already the partnership is yielding fruit.

You can read here about how DTNA is restructuring its telematics operations to give Zonar control over some key responsibilities (ie. subscription management for Virtual Technician).

What’s really interesting though is the possibility of transitioning from remote diagnostics, to predictive diagnostics. Zonar says it has already developed a pilot project that drills into big data to determine when parts are likely to fail, before they actually fail.

Replacing parts at home rather than on the road has the potential to save fleets big bucks. Of course, that has to be weighed against the cost of prematurely pulling parts that have life left in them. I recently wrote about predictive diagnostics in more detail in this supplement on the future of trucking. If you haven’t already seen it, I think it’s a worthwhile read you may enjoy.