Electric vehicle fleets generate enormous amounts of battery data every second. Cell voltages, pack temperatures, charge cycles, state of charge (SoC), state of health (SoH), and fault codes all flow through the Battery Management System (BMS). The challenge is getting this data off the vehicle and into a cloud platform where fleet managers can actually use it.
Why BMS Data Matters for Fleet Operations
Without BMS visibility, fleet operators are flying blind. They do not know which vehicles have degraded batteries, which packs are overheating, or which drivers are deep-discharging and shortening battery life. By the time a battery fails, the damage is done and the vehicle is off the road.
Real-time BMS monitoring changes this. You can track cell-level voltage imbalances weeks before they cause a failure, schedule maintenance proactively, and validate warranty claims with hard data.
Step 1: Understand Your CAN Bus Data
Most EV manufacturers expose BMS data over the CAN bus (Controller Area Network). The specific messages and their encoding vary by OEM. You need the CAN datasheet, sometimes called a DBC file, from your vehicle manufacturer or battery supplier.
This datasheet maps raw CAN frame IDs to human-readable parameters. For example, CAN ID 0x1A0 might contain SoC in bytes 0-1 and pack voltage in bytes 2-3. Without this mapping, you just see raw hex data.
Step 2: Install a CAN-Enabled Telematics Device
A standard GPS tracker cannot read CAN bus data. You need a CAN-enabled telematics device that plugs into the vehicle's OBD-II port or directly into the CAN bus wiring harness. These devices read the raw CAN frames, decode them using the DBC configuration, and transmit the decoded parameters to the cloud over 4G.
Step 3: Set Up the Cloud Pipeline
The telematics device sends data to an MQTT broker in the cloud (typically AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub). From there, the data flows into a time-series database for storage and a real-time processing engine for alerts.
Key design decisions at this stage include data retention period (we recommend at least 6 months for trend analysis), alert thresholds (e.g., cell voltage below 3.0V or temperature above 45 degrees Celsius), and dashboard refresh rate (sub-second for live monitoring, 1-minute for fleet overview).
Step 4: Build Dashboards and Alerts
The final step is building dashboards that fleet managers actually use. At minimum, you need a fleet map showing SoC for every vehicle, a battery health view showing SoH trends over time, a charging session log, and an alert feed for critical events like thermal anomalies or cell imbalances.
Alerts should go to SMS and WhatsApp, not just email. On the factory floor or in a dispatch office, nobody is watching their inbox.
What Akran IQ Does Differently
At Akran IQ, we handle this entire pipeline for you. We supply and install the CAN-enabled hardware, configure the DBC decoding, set up the cloud infrastructure, build custom dashboards, and manage everything ongoing. You do not need an IoT team. That is us.
If you are running an EV fleet in India and want to see your BMS data in the cloud, get in touch. We can have a pilot running in one week.