The growing needs to access information in remote, mobile environments have sparked interests in so-called In-Vehicle Telematics Systems (IVTS) [1]. These relatively new systems have the potential to deliver computing facilitates to road vehicles, which may include in-vehicle infotainment, route-guidance and navigation and the provision of vital information resources used by fleet haulage companies and emergency services (police, fire and ambulance). This paper describes the EmergeITS 1 project, which is concerned with the use of IVTS for emergency fire service applications. In particular, the paper describes a distributed service-based architecture, based on the Jini middleware technology, which can be used to provide fault tolerant application services to remote in-vehicle computers and mobile devices such as Palm devices and WAP phones.