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Hello all! Today is a bit of a teaser to a Focus On article that will come later, but we had such a cool experience we wanted to share it with everyone before we really dish the goods on this item.
For a while now Toyota has been developing and rolling out the Toyota MyInsights technology. At the most basic level this is a telematics system that will help you keep an eye on your fleet of forklifts, giving you basic info like error codes thrown, GPS location, Key Hours, and Impacts. Pretty soon Toyota will be unveiling more complete data and analysis packages for you to subscribe to, but something happened this week that made us stand up and notice this quiet piece of tech that's been arriving on new forklifts for the past year.
Toyota MyInsights hardware
"Hey... what's this thing?"
If you've taken delivery on a Toyota forklift in the past year you might have noticed this little widget tucked up in the overhead guard of your new lift truck. This little box spends its days making sure that a computer system back at Toyota knows how the truck is doing.
It's also what let us know about a problem before anyone at our customer's location knew about it, and even before we caught it during our regular PM visits.
Monday morning came around and all of a sudden my email Inbox started going *Ding! DingDingDin!* every couple of minutes. Checking on this lead me to where I have vehicle alerts set to end up, and I spotted nearly two dozen mails that had come from a single truck at our customer's location. It wasn't impacts though, it was actual Error Codes this time!
Reading through them showed enough Moderate to Severe Error Codes to ask our CSS and then Service departments to check with the customer and see if the truck was still functioning fine. Contactor, drive motor and controller errors in an electric truck can mean a lot of things, so when the customer said "Come on down!" one of our tech's was dispatched and looked in on things.
Nothing serious seemed to be the matter, but when our Toyota Qualified Technician checked on the new battery in this new forklift they discovered something that could have led to much more serious problems down the road: a single cell in the battery had some kind of manufacturing defect and wasn't holding voltage! Bad batteries can fry electronics and weld contactors, so the Toyota MyInsights system had actually helped us find a warranty qualified problem that wasn't even part of the Toyota forklift, but in the battery sitting inside it!
This is exactly the kind of thing we had been looking forward to since Toyota started talking about MyInsights and to see it happen "in the wild" for the first time was just awesome. We're looking forward to telling you more about the system when we can, but in the meantime you can see what Toyota says about the system.
If you've got one of these trucks already, you might be able to start seeing the benefits of instant insight on your machines. If you don't have one yet you can Get In Contact with us for more details or to bring Toyota's new technology in to work for you.
