Debate worth having: who should own trucking's data?

Every truck on the road is generating data: where it is, how fast it's going, how long it sat idle at the dock. So why do so many fleets still make the same gut feeling calls they made ten years ago?

That was the question on the IAA Transportation’s Industry Stage during last month’s panel discussion, "From data to decisions: how location intelligence is transforming truck mobility."

The research presented there is hard to ignore. Only about one in five companies has put mapping and location intelligence to work so far, yet most of the rest plan to spend well over US$60,000 on it within two years. The spending is on the horizon, but the returns are still taking shape.

What's holding things back might surprise you. Survey respondents named data security and compliance as the top barrier at 60%, followed by integration with existing systems at 50% and a lack of coordination across teams at 32%. Notice what's missing from that list: the technology itself. The tools are there, but the harder part is getting people, systems and priorities to line up behind them.

Read more: Truck data is everywhere. Real decisions are the hard part

Context is king

Niclas Gyllenram, CEO of AiDEN Auto, has spent two decades in the auto industry watching companies collect more data without always making better decisions as a result. His explanation comes down to one word: context. A fleet hauling oranges in Florida and a fleet hauling timber in northern Sweden face such different regulations, weather and traffic conditions that no single dataset or dashboard can serve them both well.

"Owning a fleet is very different in different parts of the world," said Gyllenram. He pointed out that fleet size compounds the problem, since the vast majority of fleet owners run fewer than ten trucks, while a smaller number operate enormous networks with constant driver turnover. Treating those two operations the same way, he argued, guarantees that the resulting insights will feel generic rather than useful.

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A lot riding on it

Gyllenram's clearest illustration came from a partner who owns a chain of truck stops in Southern California. The partner's observation was simple but striking: every single thing a person touches in a day has, at some point, been on a truck. "Transportation is under everything we do, everything we eat, everything we touch," said Gyllenram. "Even the glass I’m currently drinking water from has been on a truck."

His point was that inefficient transportation acts as a silent tax on everything, quietly raising the cost of goods across every industry, while a more connected, optimized system could bring those costs down for everyone.

"There is nothing really that scales for [the partner] across all the different trucking companies he's using," said Gyllenram. He added that the factory owner cannot simply pick one carrier and demand better visibility, because relying on a single trucking partner removes any leverage to negotiate price. The fragmentation that frustrates technologists also quietly drains money from businesses that have nothing to do with software.

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Two sides of the same coin

This is where the debate got to its heart: should the industry open things up so data flows freely between automakers, fleet platforms and third parties, or do customers get a better experience when everything is tightly integrated under one roof?

Gyllenram came down firmly on the side of openness. He has little patience for the instinct to "own the customer."

"I just don't think that's the right way to go," he said. "If Samsung told me I couldn't run Apple Music on my phone, I wouldn't buy the phone."

Gyllenram would take it a step further, too: if a customer prefers a rival's fleet management system, automakers should let it run on their trucks.

Andreas Josko, Head of Global Digital Solutions at Daimler Truck, sees it differently. In his view, automakers aren't the ones keeping the ecosystem locked down. Daimler Truck has run an open telematics platform for 22 years, he said, with hundreds of vehicle signals available through APIs and even an open app marketplace.

"Some of this needs to be taken with a grain of salt," said Josko. Openness only works, he argues, when both sides take on real business responsibility, and that's not a fair standard to hold any one company to.

The debate gets more specific when fleets run trucks from multiple brands. Josko acknowledged this is a real customer problem and said Daimler Truck has spent years working on it, supplying hardware and data feeds so mixed fleets can bring Daimler Truck vehicle data into third-party platforms. But he draws the line at letting outside systems send commands back to the truck.

"Some services require write access to a truck, and that can't be opened to third parties because of cybersecurity requirements," said Cranson.

It's a reminder that open versus proprietary rarely splits into two clean camps. Most automakers land somewhere in the middle: opening up what they can while protecting the controls that keep a 40-ton vehicle safe on public roads.

Read more: Logistics’ moment of truth: collaboration or stagnation?

Setting the pace

Perhaps the most practical obstacle raised at IAA was speed. Gyllenram described a cycle he knows well from his years as a supplier: a company wows everyone with a new feature at a trade show, an automaker signs on, and then everyone waits three to five years for that feature to show up in a customer's truck.

He compared that with his own team's experience. When Poland introduced new trucking regulations, AiDEN built a location reporting tool in a matter of weeks. Getting it into production still took a year, and the delay had nothing to do with the technology.

"We can put this into your current production fleets without you having to do anything," said Gyllenram, describing his pitch to HERE360: add new capabilities to trucks already on the road instead of waiting for the next vehicle generation.

Josko had a different gripe about the pace of change. Automakers carry a heavy regulatory load across data privacy, cybersecurity and software updates, and he said that compliance work increasingly slows how quickly they can respond to what customers are asking for. "I could honestly do with a little less regulation," he said.

A debate worth joining

You don't have to settle the open-versus-proprietary question on your own, but you do need to know where your company stands. Start with a few honest questions: Which data silos are actually costing you money? Could a driver trust an AI recommendation if no one can explain it to them? And can your current systems reach the trucks already on the road, not just the ones still coming off the line?

The IAA 2026 panel made it clear that most of the technology to turn raw truck data into already exists. The open question is how willing the industry is to connect it, and that's a conversation worth having now.