According to the survey by one of the biggest bank, car-sharing earned $95 million in 2018. In 2019, the results of the Yandex.Taxi and Datainsight polls showed that taxis and car-sharing are more profitable than a private car. In 2020, the president allocates $34 million for preferential leasing for carsharing services. In the same year, big city court convicted the guy, who was selling accounts in short-term car rental services. Every year car-sharing becomes more popular, it attracts investors and expands rapidly. Meanwhile car-sharing is brought to the attention frauds and unscrupulous drivers.
On the one hand, the lessor is not physically present at the time of the lease, and the apparent lack of control over provokes violations. These included traffic violatio or using a car for drift and racing. It causes frequent and expensive repairs and leads to reducing the lifetime of a car. On the other hand, customers appreciate the opportunity to use fast online rental with a simple verification procedure, and they are ready to take care of the car in order to receive discounts for next trips.
Start engine before rent time
GPS unit with CAN bus connection makes it easy to set up remote control and get ready for any scenario. For instance, in winter clients are in a hurry and do not want to warm the engine up and waste money in minutes of downtime. Therefore, the drivers start moving almost immediately after starting the engine. This decision obviously has a negative impact on engine, gearbox and finally wear on the car. Moreover, most of the cars from the car-sharing are equipped with automatic transmission, which, unlike mechanics, requires a longer warm-up. Let the customer start the engine during the booking period. Get a double benefit of a warm cabin for the customer and prolonged engine and gearbox service life.
Help to find the car
Cars can be parked in multi-level or ground parking lots with hundreds of similar vehicles. In order to help the client find the desired car faster, the system can emit audio signal and blink the headlights. Set up the car opening both through the application and by sending an SMS command. Similar features have already been implemented in many leading services, so it will be useful for regional companies focused on successful examples making their solution attractive to users.
World's experts in the car rental market admit that there is a conflict between safety and user-friendliness. Moreover, many companies make decisions in favor of the latter. The fewer bans, the better the customer experience. However, security should not be neglected. Here are some tips to do it without causing any discomfort to your customers.
Encourage careful drivers and fine recklessness
To track each client driving style use a built-in accelerometer and parallel analysis of pedal position data from the CAN bus. The solution allows to detect dangerous or aggressive driving, prevent drifting and any accidents with the car. Data from the unit are promptly sent to the service dispatcher and company is accordingly aware of all emergency situations.
Set up geofences for vehicle safety
Cars can be rented and parked only in a certain area designated by the service rules. Traveling outside the zone is prohibited, as it causes inability to stop the lease outside the zone. This is a common condition that applies to many services.
To ensure vehicles safety determine, set and create geofences basing on GPS units. Add the option to block the engine safely when it is leaving the geofence. Thus, you can prevent car theft or vandalism attempts. Moreover, one large geofence can be divided into smaller ones, with set speed limits.
Block the car when somebody’s trying to open the hood
Together with carsharing, criminals appeared. They remove spare parts from a rented car, and then put them on their own cars or sell. Often such actions are performed outside the geofences in order to make it more difficult for the car-sharing security service to find a car and to prevent crime. Offenders believe that they can open the hood and disconnect battery and be able to hide the car from service radar.
Any scenarios are available to prevent unauthorized attempts to open the hood. The service can block the car and send a notification to the dispatcher. However, there are cases when the hood needs to be opened for an objective reason – to refill washer fluid, for example. On that occasion, in the algorithm for programming actions it is necessary to prescribe the following condition: “According to data from the CAN bus, the washer fluid level is low " etc.
Refueling at partner gas stations with proper fuel only
Usually, you cannot end your lease with an empty fuel tank. There are penalties for this. Therefore, customers have to refuel themselves, notify service about refueling, get money and take advantage of bonuses for next trips. To save on fuel, create a database of approved partner gas stations and add them to the application map.
All described methods can be implemented with Galileosky GPS units with a direct CAN-bus connection and Easy Logic programming technology. See how a similar solution was implemented by the Cars7 integrator.
