Zoomcar's AI-powered tech to provide driver and vehicle analytics

Zoomcar, the self-drive mobility platform has announced launched what it claims is India’s first vehicle model agnostic Driver Score Tech Stack for the passenger car segment. The AI-powered algorithm with machine learning capabilities tracks the mechanical specs of the car being driven, driving style of the customer and identifies critical events of driving and rates it on a scale of 0-100.

The scoring system has capabilities to give real time feedback to drivers in the advent of rash driving to help them adjust their behaviour accordingly. Within the first month of its launch, the driver score has successfully reduced accident rate by 20 percent and maintenance and servicing cost by 25 percent for Zoomcar.

The company says the driver score is not a new product in the automobile industry. However, the existing solutions available in the country are neither designed for Indian conditions nor for passenger car segments. They are primarily designed for commercial vehicles and according to the western markets and demographics where driver scores are being used by insurance companies, police departments, and other regulatory authorities for some time now.

Hence the existing solutions operate at an average of 50 - 60 percent efficiency here in India as the tech stack is incompatible or oblivious to a lot of variables that define Indian conditions.

However, owing to its nature of business, scale of operation across India and its superior IOMT (Internet of Moving Things) capabilities, Zoomcar says it has vast regarding Indian road conditions and driver behaviour, with over 700 million kilometres travelled by over 14,000 Zoomcars across the length and breadth of the country and about 5 million customers’ driving behaviour over the last 6 years and counting. Zoomcar says its driver score tech stack has a 95 percent efficiency rate.

The company aims at productising this as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering in the near future and sell it as a tech enabled insurance product to existing insurers and car dealers, directly earning about 20 percent of its revenue from this by early next year. This high margin offering compliments Zoomcar’s EBITDA positive balance sheet.

Greg Moran, co-founder and CEO, Zoomcar said, "Our aim while developing this state of the art tech stack was to reduce accidents and improve asset longevity. Accidents were a major concern for us and we wanted a tech solution to help us mitigate it. Another important factor which drove innovation here was our objective to reduce the maintenance and insurance cost significantly on our assets. We can now partner with new age insurance companies and have a dynamic, user based pricing approach which would help us reduce insurance cost by as much as 50%."

The platform says it can bring about a seismic shift in the automobile industry by democratising and standardising the driving ecosystem of the country as well as give a new paradigm shift to the country’s $9 billion (Rs 63,774 crore) motor insurance sector which still use decades old benchmarks and conditions to design their products. Over and above, this also opens up new avenues for digital ad  targeting for the ecommerce players, thanks to the reputational and personalisation dimensions it harnesses.