By Kyle Pollock, director of sales, Volteras Fleet telematics is undergoing its biggest shift since the first GPS tracking boxes were bolted into dashboards 30 years ago. What began as a hardware‑led industry - defined by wired devices, manual installations and vehicle‑agnostic sensors - is now being reshaped by connected vehicles, cloud platforms due to the rapid transition from internal combustion engines (ICE) to electric vehicles (EVs). Over the next decade, connected vehicle telematics will outstrip wired telematics as the primary foundation for fleet insight by the structural change in how vehicles are built, powered and managed. This spells the beginning of a new hierarchy. Traditional wired telematics evolved to solve ICE‑specific problems and became the operating system of fleet management—powering routing, safety, compliance, maintenance, and utilization across mixed fleets, but this model is now changing with the advent of vehicle electrification. The rise of the connected vehicle Modern vehicles - especially EVs - are software‑defined platforms, designed from the outset to be connected, updatable and data‑rich. Connected vehicle telematics are built into the vehicle at the factory to include embedded cellular connectivity, native sensors and controllers, OEM‑managed cloud platforms and secure APIs that expose vehicle data externally. This fundamentally changes where telematics value is created. Instead of extracting data from hardware installed after manufacture, connected telematics generate data as part of the vehicle’s design. That distinction matters in an electric vehicle world. EVs shift the focus from engines to batteries ICE fleet telematics revolved around engines: RPMs, fuel burn, oil temperature, fault codes. EVs remove much of that complexity and replace it with batteries, power electronics, and thermal systems. The most valuable EV data includes the State of Charge (SoC) and State of Health (SoH), battery degradation trends and charging behaviour and efficiency as well as more traditional items