What Smart vehicle and Fleet Owners Should Know About Operational Challenges And Their Tech-driven Solutions

The rise of the internet has given rise to new business ideas that had never existed before. With the internet connecting people from different walks of life, shattering cultural, language, and geographical boundaries, people from around the world are starting up businesses that are proving to be convenient solutions to a myriad of problems we have been experiencing so far.

One such concern has been on our daily commute. From the time we only depended on public transport systems, we are now gradually moving towards space where we could get cabs on-demand. Though convenient, this wasn't an airtight solution to the problem of everyday commute as on-demand cab rides are often quite expensive and time-consuming.

In the spectrum, there was still scope and space for a more convenient solution. That's when smart bikes entered the market. By offering bikes and two-wheelers on-demand to commuters, allowed them to reach destinations faster and at more cost-effective prices. These fleets of smart vehicle networks made working professionals, explorers, people new to the city, and anyone looking to navigate their way through traffic become more independent.

Though it looks simple and efficient from a customer or user's perspective, only the owners of such businesses know what it takes to run and maintain them. From expanding their vehicle inventory and safeguarding them to ensuring problems are solved, every day is a struggle for business owners. And that's exactly why we decided to come up with this specific chapter of our Digital Transformation in the Automotive Sector Guide series.

Today, we will explore the umpteen challenges faced by smart vehicle business owners and resolve them through tech deployment. So, if you're a business owner, you would find this gold.

Also, check out our previous chapters on the guide to get comprehensive ideas on how tech integration can solve other crucial operational concerns.

Now, let's get started.

Challenges Faced By On-demand vehicle Sharing App Business Owners

Difficulties In Booking vehicles From Current Location

One of the major differences between booking a cab and an on-demand bike is that the cab would come to your doorstep. Regardless of whether you're standing outside your residence, workspace, restaurant, or stranded somewhere in an unknown avenue, your cab would find you.

However, that's totally not the case with vehicle sharing apps. Here, you have to reach the nearest available vehicle on foot and rent it out from an app. Every fleet has its own kiosk, where riders are supposed to drop their vehicles and lock them. So, based on your current location, you should find that kiosk closest to you and make your way there.

Problems Filing Complaints

Because riders are on their own, any concerns relating to vehicles such as ignition problems, damaged vehicles, poor braking systems, malfunctioning lights, and more have to be dealt with by themselves. Shelling out money for immediate repairs is also on them. Besides these, reaching concerned authorities to report any damages or complaints instantly is also a major concern considering riders are in a hurry heading somewhere. Business owners or fleet managers should ensure riders never get to experience any of these scenarios.

Pending Payments Record Management

To attract an initial influx of business and establish a market presence, a lot of new vehicle sharing companies offer a credit system to their riders. This age-old marketing mechanism is when you use the service and choose to pay later within a specific deadline.

Though beneficial, it is a burden on the business as it is a gamble until riders settle their dues. Tons of operational tasks such as fleet maintenance, servicing of vehicles, administration expenses, salaries, and more are dependent on user payments. When dues keep increasing from users across the network, it poses a threat to the business. And with an obsolete system, tracking and maintaining individual dues also becomes difficult with an increase in time.

Integration With Mobility

As riders, they need to know diverse information about the service they are using such as pricing per mile, subscription information, fuel records, driving miles, and more. With two-wheelers being devoid of advanced human-machine interface systems, riders need an alternate medium to look at crucial insights.

Adapting To Vehicle Innovation

To stay relevant in the industry and consistently meet changing customers' demands, businesses have to perpetually work on vehicle innovation. It's the only element that makes vehicles future-proof, create new possibilities, turn threats into opportunities and keep businesses scalable at all times. But all this will be hardly possible with no backing tech infrastructure, systems or metrics, making your business stay behind in the competition. 

Vehicle Usage History

As far as vehicle sharing services are concerned, it is highly likely that a single-vehicle is driven by several people on the same day. With so many riders getting hands-on with a vehicle on a daily basis, there has to be a tracking system in place to monitor the usage, driving discipline, handling, and more of the vehicle by users.

Without a proper vehicle usage tracking system in place, companies will really find it a hard time to identify users who caused damage and got away with it, get insights before vehicles get stolen, prevent the usage of vehicles for illegal purposes, and more.

Solutions To The Practical vehicle Sharing Concerns

For every shortcoming we discussed above, there exists a super-specific tech-based solution that offers more than what is required. From our experience and expertise, we have identified the solutions and presented them to you.

Let's explore what they are.

Mobility Applications

Mobility applications are feature-rich and bring together elements such as computational power, data analytics, infotainment, data visualization, and more to offer riders or users with optimum service-specific information. With respect to connected vehicles, mobility applications offer insights on

• vehicle mileage information
• fuel consumption
• miles driven
• emergency services and more to help riders have a comfortable ride

Rider Data And Analytics

With the deployment of the right artificial intelligence, data science, and machine learning algorithms, you can not only get a holistic view of rider data for a vehicle but generate individual reports of each rider as well.

Because these systems integrate with apps and each app is assigned to a social or personal profile, tons of insights on rider behaviour, driving attitude, traffic law obedience, speed control, and more could be easily tracked and maintained. An internal scoring system can also help businesses prevent rash drivers from utilizing the service. These analytical insights can also give businesses optimum information on making their business more user and road-friendly.

Road Safety And Predictive Maintenance

Extending the aspect discussed on the previous point, artificial intelligence can also be deployed for predictive maintenance purposes. This is all about letting the algorithms predict a probable future with respect to the available data sets such as patterns on fuel consumption, servicing and maintenance, engine health, speeding, braking, and more.

All these diverse sets of data will allow the algorithm to accurately predict when a component is most likely to malfunction. An appropriate trigger or a notification can be sent to riders in advance so they take precautionary measures and decisions respectively.

For instance, when a rider receives a notification on bad engine health and an elapsed time for malfunction, the rider can immediately find the closest kiosk and drop the vehicle off. This prevents unnecessary consequences to riders and fleet managers.

Telematics Recording

Fleet telematics is a specialized telematics recording system that allows individual vehicles to track, record, and transmit crucial information to a centralized communications system. From the ability to track a vehicle to modifying pricing based on its demand and location, telematics can work wonders for a business when defined right. Besides, it also paves the way for vehicle safety, security, and maintenance.

In simple words, telematics can bring in the following features to your fleet:

• notifications on collisions
• seamless roadside assistance and on the spot servicing and diagnostics thanks to the built-in GPS and SOS functionalities
• explore and find nearest gas stations
• streamline coordination between riders and fleet operators
• monitor rider behaviour for vehicle performance and road safety
• influence insurance premiums pricing based on driving discipline records and more

Emergency Calls

Oftentimes, riders are subjected to specific scenarios that require the immediate attention of stakeholders. This could be an accident or any unprecedented event that could harm riders and vehicles. To tackle such situations, an emergency calling feature can be embedded into the system to enable automatic notifications in the form of calls or messages to be triggered to contacts stored as emergency recipients. This will offer the receivers all precise details such as vehicle location and features to message and call other contact numbers. Inevitable for road and rider safety.

Breakdown Calls

Though similar to the above-discussed solution, the breakdown calling feature differs in the fact that the notifications are not sent to emergency contacts but to service professionals or centers to attend to vehicle breakdowns. Information like vehicle location, error or malfunction details, and more are sent to specific professionals, allowing the nearest personnel to arrive and fix the vehicle. This is important because when a vehicle has malfunctioned, riders cannot be expected to push or move them to the closest kiosk. All they could do is park them by the side and trigger a breakdown call for servicing associates to attend to on the spot.

Stolen vehicle Tracing

Because this is a service that can be used or abused, companies should prepare for the worst-case scenarios such as vehicle stealing. Vehicles would be exposed to situations where the onboard devices are broken and vehicles are stolen for diverse purposes. To prevent instances like these, advanced telematics and vehicle tracking systems can be installed. These systems consistently keep track of the vehicle location and use satellite mechanisms to convey location details to stakeholders. This allows fleet owners and managers to track stolen vehicles and retrieve them accordingly.

Smart vehicle Sharing And Rental Solutions

There are two aspects to this:

• web apps to book vehicles online
• multiple payment systems

Let's look at both the solutions in detail.

Web Apps or Services

Apart from a smartphone application, having a web application will allow you to cater to users who don't have access to a smartphone at that moment. With the web version, riders can execute actions that they would do on their smartphone apps such as look for vehicles nearby, book rides, and more.

Multiple Payment Systems

This solution offers liberty to users in terms of the way they choose to make their payments. As fleet owners, you should ensure you offer them as many options as possible to help them make their payments. From banking services and card functionalities to digital wallets, users should be able to make use of their preferred mode of payments.

One of the other major reasons this is crucial is because fleet owners could automatically charge riders for their pending dues and payments, allowing the business to have a consistent incoming cash flow.

Case Study

Link – Scooter Sharing App

The next generation scooter sharing app is all about simplifying micro commutes. Made for travellers, explorers, working professionals, and probably everyone looking for swift commuting options, Lime provides one of the most ideal solutions.

Now, Link promises two things – comfort and affordability. It allows users to quickly find a nice scooter to unlock and get going with their work at really economical prices.

To make this happen, it deploys QR code functionalities that users would have to scan from their smartphone apps to unlock their vehicles. Once the vehicle is unlocked, they can move around freely.

One of the ways Link differentiates itself from other providers is that it conducts checks of its vehicles before every ride to ensure the safety of riders. It also enables every vehicle in its fleet with triple braking systems for added road safety. With seamless payment features, location-based services, emergency calling, and more, Link is your companion.

For those of you who intend to get started with developing a bike-sharing app, this is a good app to get some inspiration.

The Future of vehicle Sharing

The vehicle sharing industry offers tremendous potential and scope for creative solutions to plaguing concerns. It is also a hub for innovation that would prove to be extremely convenient to riders. From what we've been experiencing through our conversations with our vehicle sharing services business owners, we understand that the future would only be vivid.

To help you get on board with our visualization, here are a few aspects of the probable future.

• Subscription-based revenue models could replace the existing rental scheme, allowing users to make better use of the service through their recurring payments.
• Security surrounding the app and vehicles will become more airtight. We are looking at advanced security solutions like a fingerprint or biometric scanners for vehicle unlocks and usage. This will enable only registered users to operate vehicles.
• Advanced alarms will also be part of this ecosystem that will give out a loud sound when devices are tried for removal or stealing.
• Blockchain-based payments are also on the cards for seamless and private transactions.
• Vehicle-pooling is a probable concept, where riders can have another pillion on the same route and share the expenses. This would need an equally powerful and ambitious route navigation system and a matching algorithm to serve the purpose.
• Connected fleets will allow riders to switch vehicles whenever they receive a notification of a probable vehicle malfunction. This ensures their commute is undisturbed.

So, what do you think? Not just the present but the future of vehicle sharing looks exciting as well, right?

Like we mentioned, the scope for innovation and profits is abundant in this spectrum. All you need is automotive software that is scalable, secure, and solid. And for that, you need the assistance of a premier automotive software development company like us.

Experts in the field, we deliver some of the world's finest automotive management solutions, IoT automotive diagnostic software, ERPs, and more to help your business avoid operational troubles and expenses and focus on profits.

So, if you are one of the keen souls to take your business to higher levels, reach out to us today.