Global commercial navigation system shipments will grow to 7.5 million in 2015 from 3 million in 2010, according to an ABI Research study.
Pushing that growth, said ABI Navigation and Telematics Practice Director Dominique Bonte, will be the availability of truck-specific mapping in the Asia-Pacific commercial navigation market.
The research group’s “Commercial Navigation Systems” study describes commercial navigation form factors and features, drivers and barriers, pricing, players and products and includes forecasts as well as a detailed segmentation analysis for North America.
Different form factors — such as dedicated embedded solutions, commercial-grade portable navigation devices (PNDs) and converged solutions — are vying for market share, the report said. Traditional fleet management vendors Qualcomm, Navman Wireless and others are increasingly integrating commercial navigation into their solutions based on software from vendors such as Maptuit or Mireo.
However, the recent introduction of commercial grade PNDs by Garmin, Cobra, and Rand McNally provides a cheaper alternative for smaller fleets. Navigon even allows downloading aftermarket truck map attributes on consumer PNDs. Finally, vendors such as Telenav and ALK Technologies offer smart phone-based commercial navigation solutions.
Similar to developments in other technologies, there is a clear trend toward off-board cloud-based solutions leveraging the processing power of remote servers to calculate complex routing based on a large number of parameters, and static and dynamic restrictions.
