Track hire cars

Looking for a solution - in the past year we have had a couple of people
hire cars, but for whatever reason, they have been unable to return them or
they wanted to drive them from our base to a different location and continue
with another means of transport, and have us collect the vehicle which we
are happy to do for an extra charge. This is rare, but does happen.

We have sometimes had difficulty locating the vehicles and seek a device
which we can place in the vehicle to return the location so it can be found
easily.

Requirements are

-Battery life of at least 14 days
-We text/call a GSM SIM in the device and it will return the GPS coordinates
so we can paste them into Google Earth
-No monthly subscription service
-Cost around £100 per unit

Some of the devices I have looked at that will do this function are over
£500 per unit or the battery life is insufficient.

Any ideas?

£100 is very optimistic unless you require a large number of units.

You will need to negotiate with a mobile phone network if you want a no
subscription data package. That will probably be impossible unless you
have a large number of units.

The GPS will most likely not work if the car is parked in a building
(e.g. multi-storey car park) so you would need the device to record the
track of the car so you can at least download that to find the entrance
to the building it is in.

If it is a rare requirement you are probably better off putting a
penalty clause in the hire agreement for circumstances when they do not
give an accurate location of where they left the car.
--
Dominic Sexton

--
Michael Chare

I am sure that read somewhere that some hire cars contain concealed GPSs
that report their locations.

A tracking device would need to report its location on a regular basis as it
won't know when the car has been parked for you to collect.

Maybe your customers could use their phone cameras to send you a picture of
where a car is parked.

--
Michael Chare