Data hunting in a Swiss bunker: when telematics goes James Bond

When I say “telematics data analysis”, most people imagine a dull office, flickering neon lights, lukewarm coffee, and endless Excel spreadsheets. But my last few years have been anything but boring.

You see, telematics isn’t just about watching dots move on a map. The real fun starts when we have to extract the “truth” from a machine – whether it’s a tiny city car or a massive piece of heavy machinery. I’ve dug up three stories from the last three years where getting the data meant going underground or pushing technology to its absolute limit.

Let’s start with my favourite one, where my “home office” turned out to be a secret military facility.

The Swiss bunker, the Unimogs, and the end of “fake ploughing”

Picture the scene: The Canton of Valais (Wallis) in Switzerland. It’s postcard-perfect, with mountains reaching the sky and everything running like clockwork. The job sounded simple at first: extract data from snowploughs.

But there was a catch. These were Unimog vehicles owned by private contractors, and the client had a suspicion that the invoicing was sometimes… well, let’s call it “creative”. GPS on its own is useless here. GPS only tells you: “I was here.” But the client needed to know: “Were you actually working, or just going for a drive?”

My task was to read the data from the front and rear interfaces—the bits where they attach the plough blade and the salt spreader. We needed to know if the blade was actually down on the tarmac. Was the salt spreader spinning? Or were they just cruising around the winding mountain roads with the blade up to rack up the billable kilometres?

The Stakeout Here is the twist. We didn’t do the measurements in a nice, warm garage. The location was a former military underground tunnel system and bunker.

Imagine the contrast: outside, beautiful Swiss scenery. Inside, we are deep in the belly of the mountain, surrounded by thick concrete walls and echoing silence, standing next to these massive mechanical beasts. It felt less like checking CAN-bus data and more like being part of a secret James Bond weapon experiment.

But technology doesn’t lie. We found the signals. We managed to extract the exact bits that tell us if the blade is pushing snow or just pushing air. Deep in that bunker, the Unimog finally “confessed”. The system went live, the tricks are over, and the roads in Valais are (hopefully) cleaner than ever.

Tacos, thin air, and the mystery of the missing manuals in Mexico City

From the cold Swiss bunker, we jump straight to the vibrant heat of Mexico City.

Here, Daimler manufactures long-distance buses and lorries, specifically for the local Mexican market. The setting was amazing: the weather was perfect, the food was incredible, and the city is beautiful. The only downside? The altitude. At 2,200 metres above sea level, even a short walk to the workshop leaves you huffing and puffing a bit!

The “hand-me-down” problem

The engineering challenge here was completely different from the Swiss one. The parent company of Daimler in Ulm (Germany) doesn’t send the latest, shiny ECU versions to the Mexican plant. Instead, they often supply slightly older generations of control units.

To make matters worse, the “instruction manuals” (the documentation) for these older units were incomplete or simply missing. It was like trying to build a complex Lego set, but half the pages were ripped out of the booklet…

The altitude puzzle

The local fleet owners were desperate for specific data, which was hidden somewhere in that mess of wires and code:

• Altitude data: Essential in a country with such massive height differences.
• Fuel mixture optimisation: Engines breathe differently in thin air, and they needed to see how the computer was adjusting the mix.
• Additive levels: Checking things like AdBlue levels to keep emissions in check.

Since we couldn’t just look up the codes in a book, we had to measure and “reverse engineer” everything on-site. We spent our days hunting for electronic signals in the workshop and our evenings hunting for the best street food in the city. It was a breathless experience – literally and figuratively – but we managed to map out the missing data perfectly.