A UK-based company, DOVU, which serves as a blockchain marketplace for the transportation sector, completed an experiment with BMW to implement blockchain technology to track vehicle mileage with ERC-20 tokens, according to an article posted by DOVU on Medium.
BMW fleet vehicle arm supports blockchain pilot
Recently, BMW invited DOVU to participate in its innovation lab, which is seeking disruptive and innovative ideas and the ten-week pilot began on 15th January at the headquarters of BMW in London.
Executives from the leasing vehicle arm of BMW, Alphabet, participated as the sponsors for DOVU: Leo Taylor, head of product management, Nick Brownrigg, chief executive officer, and Simon Carr as the chief commercial officer.
Finance and leasing have been an essential part of BMW’s profit. A vehicle that is damaged or has high mileage undermines its resale value.
At the beginning of the test, the DOVU team concluded that implementing tokens to affect customer behavior, and the capability to get access to data through the blockchain, were likely to have an impact on the company’s profitability.
DOVU met the stakeholders at BMW to regulate how DOV tokens could have a positive impact on the vehicle value. The DOVU team identified that vehicle mileage has the greatest effect on the return value of the vehicle, as the higher mileage, the greater the wear on the vehicle will be.
Existing method prone to errors
Currently, the company BMW tracks the mileage of its vehicles through fleets using a fuel card, a process that is prone to lack of management and typing errors, providing useless and inconsistent data.
The connected vehicles monitoring the tracked data is only implemented for diagnostic purposes if the vehicle is put into service. Retrieving this data requires the permission of the driver. Therefore, this sort of information through the connected vehicle is not easily accessible. Meanwhile, the present system requires a vast amount of clerical overhead.
In fact, an automated process to assemble mileage wasn’t available to DOVU for the pilot. Therefore, DOVU complied to permit the BMW customers to use a manual approach to track such data in exchange for token-based rewards. Every week, customers were persuaded to use their smartphone cameras to click a picture of their dashboard at a particular time to deliver mileage information.
DOVU was capable of identifying the dashboard reading and transforming them into an integer that was saved to the blockchain.
The customers confirmed appropriate information before submitting it, and instantly BMW had a traceable and decisive log of vehicle mileage on the blockchain. Meanwhile, users were rewarded with 1 DOVU token per submission. To encourage repeat reporting DOVU used gamification, allowing its users to keep earning tokens.
Custom wallet released
Consequently, DOVU launched a custom wallet for BMW at the end of the 10-week pilot, which allows DOVU to know how tokenization persuades people to carry out specific tasks.
DOVU executives said :
“Adding that the startup hopes to continue working with BMW to identify other areas in which blockchain technology can be used to improve its business operations.”
