The data was on the bus. Getting it off, reliably, was the work.
Every vehicle already knows its own speed, load and faults — the trick is getting that off the bus and into the back office without draining the battery or losing data in a tunnel. A telematics gateway is defined by three unglamorous problems: reading the bus safely, staying connected through dead zones, and never flattening a parked vehicle.
DomainConnected product, vehicle telematics
PlatformsConnected Edge
ScopeBus interface to back-office telemetry
Binding constraintRead the bus, survive dead zones, spare the battery
DisclosureRepresentative programme; customer not named
CONTEXT
Where this started.
A telematics gateway plugs into a vehicle and turns its internal data — speed, RPM, fuel, diagnostic trouble codes, load — into a live feed for a fleet operator. The vehicle already produces all of it on the CAN bus; the gateway's job is to extract it reliably and get it home.
None of the hard parts are the headline. Reading the bus without disturbing it, across the variations between vehicles, is delicate. Cellular coverage disappears in tunnels, car parks and rural routes, so data has to be buffered and forwarded rather than streamed and lost. And a parked vehicle must not be woken flat by a gateway that never sleeps.
So the device is engineered for the field it lives in: safe, tolerant bus access, store-and-forward connectivity that treats coverage as intermittent, and a power strategy that sleeps with the vehicle and wakes when it should.
CHALLENGES
4 problems, named.
Stated before any of them had an answer.
01
Reading the bus without disturbing it
The gateway must observe CAN and OBD traffic across many vehicle variants without interfering with the vehicle's own systems — a tolerant, careful interface, not a naive tap.
02
Coverage is intermittent
Tunnels, underground car parks and rural routes drop cellular; data streamed naively is simply lost, so it has to be buffered and forwarded.
03
A parked vehicle can be woken flat
A gateway that never sleeps drains the battery of a vehicle left for days; power management has to follow the vehicle's state.
04
Fleets are heterogeneous
Different makes, buses and protocols across one fleet mean the gateway cannot assume one vehicle; it has to adapt.
ARCHITECTURE
How it was built.
The data exists the moment the engine runs. The product is getting it off the bus intact, through the dead zones, without flattening a battery that is meant to start the vehicle.
CONTRIBUTION
What Faststream did.
The scope of the work, rather than a capability list.
CAN and OBD interface — a tolerant, non-intrusive bus interface that reads across vehicle variants without disturbing the vehicle.
Signal decoding — turning raw bus traffic into meaningful trips, faults and thresholds across a heterogeneous fleet.
Store-and-forward — local persistence and ordered backfill so a tunnel or a dead zone loses nothing.
Resilient cellular uplink — connectivity that assumes intermittency rather than a perfect link.
Power management — sleeping with the parked vehicle and waking on the right events, so the battery still starts the engine.
Secure device identity — each gateway trusted at the back end so fleet data cannot be spoofed.
WHAT WAS HARD
The parts that consumed the schedule.
Rarely the subsystem that sounds difficult.
01
Bus variation across a fleet
One fleet spans makes, model years and protocols; a gateway that works on one vehicle and not the next is a support nightmare, so tolerance is designed in.
02
Losing nothing in a dead zone
Store-and-forward sounds simple until reconnection ordering, buffer limits and duplicate suppression are handled honestly.
03
Sleeping deeply enough
The power budget for a parked vehicle is unforgiving; the difference between a gateway that respects the battery and one that flattens it is careful sleep design.
04
Not disturbing the vehicle
Reading a safety-relevant bus without affecting it is a responsibility, not a convenience; the interface is conservative by design.
OUTCOME
What resulted.
Data home intact
Vehicle telemetry delivered reliably, with nothing lost to a tunnel or a dead zone.
Battery respected
A parked vehicle that still starts, because the gateway sleeps with it.
Works across the fleet
One device that adapts to mixed makes and protocols rather than one vehicle.
Trusted at the back end
Secure device identity so the fleet feed cannot be spoofed or replayed.
Confidentiality
Customer projects are presented at property, capability, outcome and integration level. Customer names, internal architecture, confidential deliverables and commercial terms are not disclosed. Where a detail would identify a customer it is omitted rather than approximated. More is available under a non-disclosure agreement, within the limits the customer has agreed.
Why is telematics hard if the vehicle already has the data?
Because producing the data and delivering it are different problems. The vehicle generates speed, fuel and fault information on its internal bus continuously; the gateway has to read that bus safely across many vehicle variants, survive the cellular dead zones of tunnels and rural routes without losing anything, and do it all without draining the battery of a vehicle that might sit parked for days. Those field realities, not the data itself, are the engineering.
02
How does it avoid losing data with no signal?
With store-and-forward. Instead of streaming data and hoping for a link, the gateway persists it locally and forwards it when coverage returns, preserving order and suppressing duplicates on reconnection. Coverage is treated as inherently intermittent, so a tunnel or an underground car park is a normal condition the design expects, not a failure.
03
How do you keep it from flattening the battery?
By managing power to follow the vehicle's state. When the vehicle is running, the gateway is active; when it is parked, the gateway sleeps deeply and wakes only on the events that justify it. The power budget for the parked case is the demanding one, because a device that draws steadily over days can leave a vehicle unable to start — so deep sleep and justified wake are core to the design.