There are several areas of vehicle data that need to be considered when creating a ‘trip’.
For example, engine start and stop may seem like sensible events to base a trip around but many vehicles are equipped with automatic start/stop functions to improve fuel economy. Using this data alone may show a trip has ended when the driver is simply waiting at traffic lights. This gets more complex with hybrid vehicles that may start the engine after the vehicle has started moving. Similarly, movement of a vehicle alone may not always represent an actual trip properly if it is stuck in traffic or waiting at the lights.
Toyota Halo deals with this situation by delaying the start and end of a reported trip by 2 minutes to reduce the likelihood of erroneous trip reporting due to such non-trip events.
This allows the platform to interpret the data received from vehicles and translate it in a ‘real world’ meaningful way. This can occasionally result in some unusual events in the breadcrumb report, such as ignition on/off events appearing to be out of sequence such as the example below.
This can also occasionally result in vehicles appearing to be stuck in a moving state.
