One of the UK’s biggest police forces has reinforced its position at the forefront of advanced telematics use within the UK police sector with an order to equip an additional 500 of its vehicles with the Airmax system.

This latest order will take the West Yorkshire force to around 600 telematics equipped vehicles.

The system developed in partnership with telematics and remote vehicle diagnostics supplier Airmax has been designed from the outset to provide an advanced ‘police specification’ system providing data across the operational, driver training and vehicle diagnostics areas, as well as conforming to the emerging UK wide ACPO and Home Office ‘OneBox/DVDMS standard, which is currently being trialled across a number of UK police forces and on which Airmax is partnered with both West Yorkshire and Hertfordshire.

Among the key features of the system, in addition to real time GPS, are vehicle status related to blues and twos, fuel usage, driver profiling, and KPI’s on speed/over revving/idling/harsh acceleration and braking.

The system also automatically logs each vehicle journey to an individual driver via a discreet RFID proximity reader based on the West Yorkshire force’s RFID enabled warrant cards. This latter feature also incorporates an ignition inhibit facility which requires driver ID in order to complete the ignition cycle.

The supplier, Airmax, based in Dorset and Coventry is an established supplier within the vehicle telematics arena with some 30,000 equipped vehicles predominantly in the UK but also in France, Holland and the US.

Although relatively little known under its own brand name, the company is the developer and supplier of ALD Automotive’s ProFleet 2 system.

Airmax has also recently equipped part of the Vauxhall police demonstrator fleet with its system to provide enhanced integration and functionality with their ES (emergency services) CAN vehicles.