Zoomcar, the self-drive mobility platform has just launched what it claims is India’s first driver- monitoring system for the passenger vehicle segment. Called the Driver Score Tech Stack, the AI-powered algorithm with machine learning capabilities tracks the mechanical specs of the car being driven, the driving style of the customer and identifies critical events of driving and rates it on a scale of 0-100.
The scoring system can give real-time feedback to drivers in the advent of rash-driving to help them adjust their behaviour. Within the first month of its launch, the driver score has successfully reduced accident rates 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 for the western markets and demographics.
Hence, the existing solutions operate at an average of 50 - 60 percent efficiency here as they are either incompatible or oblivious to a lot of variables that define Indian conditions.
However, the company says it has vast info 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 six years and counting. It says its driver score tech stack has a 95 percent efficiency rate.
The company aims at positioning 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.
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 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 percent."
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 uses decades-old benchmarks and conditions to design their products. Over and above, this also opens up new avenues for digital ad targeting for the e-commerce players.
Rivan RS 
Viraaj Bhatnagar
Uday Singh
Suraj Viswanathan
