Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Smartcar’s mileage verification API allows auto insurance providers to calculate premiums more accurately and assist policyholders with fairer refunds.

COVID-19 challenges

Auto insurance companies and their policyholders are facing unprecedented challenges due to COVID-19. Many states have ordered residents to stay at home except to perform essential activities. People across the country are driving 35% to 50% less than they used to, resulting in fewer accidents and fewer insurance claims. On top of that, more than 16 million people have filed for unemployment since mid-March. Many of them struggle to pay their bills on time.

To address these challenges, numerous insurers have announced refunds or credits towards their March, April, and/or May premiums. While these discounts provide necessary temporary relief for many vehicle owners, they are not a fair or sustainable long-term approach to the COVID-19 crisis.

By offering the same discount to all customers, insurers overcharge policyholders who are barely driving, while undercharging those who continue to drive as much as before. As the COVID-19 crisis will likely last longer than just a few more weeks, insurers need to quickly find a way to assist customers in need while accurately assessing risk.

Fairer premiums with verified mileage

Smartcar’s mileage verification API allows insurance providers to charge customers based on their verified mileage during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Smartcar Connect lets policyholders consent to sharing specific vehicle telemetry with an insurer’s web or mobile app. The insurer can then automatically verify the vehicle’s odometer reading using Smartcar’s automated scheduling system. Our technology communicates directly with the cellular modem that is already built into most new cars. This allows insurers to rapidly implement our product, instantly onboard policyholders, and cost-efficiently deploy the solution at scale.

When verifying each vehicle’s mileage, insurance providers are able to charge their customers more fairly and more accurately during the COVID-19 pandemic. Insurers can choose to implement a pay-per-mile approach or to offer simple monthly refunds when a policyholder doesn’t exhaust their premium’s estimated mileage.

Customer trust and long-term savings

By offering more affordable prices to policyholders who drive less, insurers are able to retain a grateful and loyal customer base, all while attracting new customers during this challenging time. Finally, Smartcar allows insurers to invest in a sustainable solution to price premiums more accurately even after COVID-19. Underreported mileage causes American auto insurers $5.4 billion in losses every year. Our mileage verification API enables insurers to accurately assess each policyholder’s risk and maximize their profits in the long-run.

Originally published at https://smartcar.com on April 20, 2020.

How auto insurers can offer telematics-driven premium refunds during COVID-19 was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, Smartcar is launching its car API for auto insurance providers. The API allows insurers to retrieve telemetry from most new vehicles across the United States. Insurance providers are able to address $10 billion in premium leakage by seamlessly verifying their customers ‘ mileage, garaging location, and VIN.

The concern about premium leakage

Premium leakage is omitted or misstated information that leads to inaccurate insurance policy pricing. In the United States, personal auto insurers lose $29 billion due to premium leakage every year. Underestimated mileage, misrepresented garaging locations, and incorrectly reported VINs account for over a third of these losses, amounting to $10.4 billion.

Until now, insurance providers had no efficient way to combat premium leakage. Existing telematics solutions are often expensive, unreliable, and inaccurate, making it difficult for customers to share their vehicle information with insurers.

The car API for auto insurers

Using the Smartcar API, insurance providers can now instantly, accurately, and cost-effectively retrieve telemetry from their customers’ vehicles. Our technology takes advantage of the cellular modem that is already built into most new cars (2015 and later). Smartcar is compatible with 15 vehicle brands in the United States today and continues to expand.

How it works

Insurers can embed Smartcar Connect into their web portal or mobile app and collect user consent with just a few clicks. As Smartcar Connect provides transparency around exactly which information will be shared, insurers are able to build and maintain the trust of their customers.

After obtaining permission, Smartcar webhooks automatically send telemetry from the customer’s vehicle to the insurer’s organization. By verifying their customers’ mileage, garaging location, and VIN, insurers are able to address $10.4 billion in annual losses. They also increase customer retention through a simplified user experience and no more manual self-reporting.

The car API for auto insurers is available to all insurance providers in the United States starting today. We will announce some of our current customers soon.

To request a product demo or to learn more about our features and pricing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Smartcar team.

Originally published at https://smartcar.com on March 11, 2020.

Smartcar launches auto insurance solution to address $10 billion in premium leakage was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When Sanketh and I set out to raise our seed round for Smartcar, we found several pitch decks from consumer startups, however we struggled to find any from B2B or developer-focused companies. To give back to the startup community, we are making our original pitch deck (with a few retractions) that got us a $2 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz available to everyone.

Sanketh and I set out to build an app for our car in 2014. Within a few weeks, we realized this was incredibly difficult to do. No car brand offered a self-service developer portal, API documentation, or SDKs. We discovered that developers faced a major pain point and we quickly shifted away from building an app to building a developer platform.

After we managed to get a prototype working, we put together a pitch deck over the course of a few weeks and ran through our slides with other founders and advisors for feedback. We soon had a set of slides which covered topics such as our problem statement, solution, and competitive landscape.

The deck

With the following deck, we successfully raised $2 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and officially started Smartcar in January 2015.

Smartcar is an API for cars. Developers can incorporate Smartcar APIs into their own apps. Our technology works out of the box on most new cars without any retrofits or aftermarket hardware.

While it is relatively easy and fast to build a web page or even a mobile app, it is nearly impossible to build an app for cars. Some companies I spoke with had spent years trying to integrate with a single car brand. No OEM provided a friendly self-service developer portal. Smartcar solves this problem.

The Smartcar API is compatible with any make or model meaning developers only need to integrate our API once to support any new car. This removes friction and lets developers focus on what they do best: building their business, not spending countless hours figuring out how to integrate with cars.

Smartcar prides itself in providing incredibly friendly API documentation rarely seen in the automotive world. Paired with SDKs for popular programming languages like Python or Node, developers can locate or even unlock the doors to a car with just a few lines of code.

While cellular connectivity built into vehicles is initially appearing within premium brands, nearly every OEM plans to equip all their new models with the same technology within the next few years. A new market is quickly emerging. We feel now is the right time to raise capital.

While many companies have raised capital for connected car offerings, nearly all of their solutions depend on aftermarket hardware. Smartcar is differentiated because our technology works right out of the factory on most new vehicles. Additionally, we provide the most flexible offering since our product is an API.

We charge developers (aka businesses) a SaaS fee to use our API. Our product creates value in many verticals from auto insurance to car rentals.

Sanketh isn’t just my co-founder, he is also my brother. I have the role of the CEO while Sanketh is the CTO. We also have two advisors who are supporting our journey.

We worked backwards from our goal to determine where we wanted to be as a business in 24 months, how many people we would need to get there, and how much it would ultimately cost. After adding some room for error, we knew that we needed $2 million to make this happen.

Smartcar today 🚀

Since the seed round, we’ve also raised a $10 million Series A from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). We’re based in Mountain View, California and we serve customers in several verticals including fleet management, auto insurance, and car sharing. Our API is now compatible with 15 car brands and offers a wide range of API endpoints including lock, unlock, location, odometer, fuel tank level, and EV battery level.

The past few years have been an incredibly challenging but rewarding experience. The Smartcar team is proud to continue empowering developers to build the future of mobility.

If you enjoyed this post and are interested in our job opportunities, feel free to check out the Smartcar careers page. If you are looking for any feedback on a pitch deck for your startup, don’t hesitate to reach out @sahaskatta.

Upcoming events:

Smartcar Demo Night

Originally published at https://smartcar.com on February 10, 2020.

The pitch deck that got Smartcar $2 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to part 2 of our company value blog post series. After part 1, today’s topic lies especially close to our hearts: respect. We’ve done a lot to create a respectful work culture here at Smartcar, and we’d love to share our insights with you.

Kindness

Fostering a respectful work environment can mean a lot of things. To us, it means being kind, inclusive, and collaborative.

We pride ourselves on having a truly kind team here at Smartcar. We’re genuine and down-to-earth people that work hard but don’t take themselves too seriously. The phrase “this isn’t in my job description” is not in our vocabulary. As a team, we fail and succeed together, and we stay a team even outside of work.

To mention a few examples, our founders Sahas and Sanketh helped Gurpreet (Senior Software Engineer) move to a new apartment one weekend. When we receive significantly more job applications than usual, the whole team helps Jackie and me with screening applications and hopping on interview calls. When our Content Writer, Charlotte, publishes a blog post that she really wants to go viral, the entire company shares her post and even calls up friends and family to chip in.

Inclusivity

Being respected has a lot to do with feeling welcome and feeling empowered to participate. If you have an idea — share it! If you have hesitations about something — speak up! If you see that someone needs help on a project — help them! We value a no BS environment with open communication and equal opportunities for everyone. A few examples of this include:

When giving a job offer to a potential new team member, several colleagues send out congratulations emails. We want new team members to know we’re excited to meet them, and we want them to feel welcome right from the start.

No matter which department you work in, everyone is welcome to join in on different teams’ meetings. Many of our Business team members have participated in Engineering sprint planning, and asked questions to fully understand the technical side of our product. All of our engineers have joined our Head of Sales and Business Development, Zeenia, on Sales pitches to understand the needs of potential new customers. Some of our interns have sat in on candidate interviews to learn more about our recruiting process.

When our Recruiting team proposed hosting quarterly demo events at our office, our CEO provided a budget to experiment and prove the concept. After three events and one new hire from each event, we transformed the experiment into an ongoing part of our recruiting practices. Check out our Meetup page to learn more!

Even outside of working hours, we sometimes go hiking, boxing, or bowling together. Other times we organize game or movie nights, or we feast together at a potluck or barbecue. Every team member brings in their own background and interests, so our outside-of-work activities never get boring.

Collaboration

Last but not least, creating a respectful work environment means to collaborate. You can’t respect someone or be respected if you’re completely alone. In fact, all our roles here at Smartcar involve working with and learning from others.

Our engineers often work on larger projects in pairs. They also do code reviews and peer programming. Finally, at least two engineers have to approve every PR before gets merged in.

Smartcar’s Recruiting team is highly collaborative as well. We work with the Marketing team on organizing events and managing our social media channels. We also value the team’s input when hiring someone new to join the Smartcar family. During the final step of our interview process, five team members participate in interviews. When we make our decision, hearing various perspectives helps us eliminate bias and ensure that we’re hiring top talent.

Finally, the Marketing function benefits from close collaboration with other departments. Charlotte wouldn’t be able to improve SEO without help from Engineering, send the right email campaign without help from Product and Sales, and publish a blog post about our company values without — well — help from someone on our Recruiting team. 😉

This is how we’re being kind, inclusive, and collaborative to create a respectful work environment at Smartcar. Of course, no company is perfect, so we’re always striving to listen to everyone’s feedback, to keep doing what we’re doing well, and to improve what we could do better.

Stay tuned for two further blog posts about our remaining company values, and feel free to reach out to our People & Operations team with any questions. We’d love to chat!

Originally published at https://smartcar.com on September 19, 2019.

Smartcar’s company culture: How we’re creating a respectful work environment was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As an alternative to self-reported mileage and aftermarket hardware solutions, more and more insurance companies have started using their policyholders’ smartphones as a tool for tracking and verifying mileage information. Here is why this popular solution is problematic, and which route your insurance business can take instead.

Tracking mileage with a customers’ smartphone

At first sight, using a smartphone for mileage verification sounds favorable. Policyholders download an app and set their location sharing to “always.” From here on, the phone’s accelerometer and location services are doing the magic. The phone detects the start and end of a trip. It then calculates driven mileage based on the phone’s continuous location data.

The problems

As simple and convenient as it may seem, there are numerous problems with using smartphones to track vehicle mileage:

• Inaccuracy: No matter how advanced the technology, smartphones always report mileage data with a certain degree of inaccuracy. The reason is simple. Phones can’t access a car’s true odometer reading, and inferring mileage from location data merely leads to an estimate. Phones can also fail to capture the start or end of a trip, and they can even erroneously report a trip, while the policyholder is actually riding in an Uber or taking the bus.
• Unintentional failure: Beside the mentioned technological failures, human error and leniency add to the problem. From time to time, policyholders forget their phones at home. Phones can also run out of power during the middle of a trip, due to the constant use of location services in the background.
• Intentional fraud: When the failure to report mileage is not accidental, we are facing blatant mileage fraud. Before going on a long trip, some policyholders intentionally disable location services, uninstall the insurance app, or simply turn off their phones. Now, the insurance provider has no way of capturing the policyholder’s trips, until the policyholder turns their phone back on, re-enables location services, or re-downloads the deleted app.
• Privacy concerns: Finally, with the rise of privacy concerns across many industries, some prospective customers are hesitant to commit to an insurance policy that constantly accesses their location and reports every trip they make.

Tracking mileage without a customers’ smartphone

That said, smartphones aren’t the best way to report and verify car mileage. We at Smartcar have given this topic a lot of thought, and we’ve worked hard to develop a solution that solves all of the mentioned problems in one go.

The solution

Smartcar’s mileage verification solution uses API technology to let insurance businesses do the following:

1. With just a few clicks, Smartar lets policyholders link their cars to an insurance app.
2. For maximum transparency, the insurance app lets policyholders accept or deny a detailed list of permissions (e.g. access a vehicle’s odometer reading, location, or VIN).
3. The insurance provider can now automatically access the policyholder’s true odometer reading every month, every year, or however often they need to.

As our API communicates directly with each vehicle, there is no need to constantly monitor location data, or to estimate and calculate mileage based on other information. Smartcar is the first mileage verification solution that eliminates the risk of inaccuracy, failure to report, battery drainage, fraud, and privacy complaints. Our product does the heavy lifting and simplifies mileage verification, so that insurance providers can focus on what’s important: successful underwriting, a growing customer base, and increased profits.

Are you wondering how Smartcar caters to your insurance product? Would you like to learn more about our product or schedule a demo with our sales team? Feel free to reach out to us. We’ll be happy to assist!

Originally published at https://smartcar.com on September 17, 2019.

How to verify mileage without a smartphone was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Underreported mileage causes the auto insurance industry billions of dollars in losses every year. But what exactly is underreported mileage, and how can insurance businesses avoid it?

What is underreported mileage?

Underreported mileage is a form of soft fraud. It occurs when policyholder report a certain number of miles driven, while they actually drove more than the reported amount.

Unfortunately, this underreporting of mileage happens quite frequently. Most insurance companies allow policyholders to self-report their annual mileage, asking policyholders how much their car was driven that year. Those insurance providers don’t have a way of verifying whether the driver’s answer aligns with the vehicle’s actual odometer reading. Of course, this common practice invites policyholders to give rough estimates rather than accurate statements, or to even lie about their mileage information.

Why is it an issue?

Underreported mileage poses a huge problem to almost all insurance businesses. People who drive more are at bigger risk of getting into accidents. When policyholders lie about how much they drive, insurance providers will work with erroneous data and inaccurately calculate risk. The result is a large amount of premium leakage for insurance companies every single year.

More than half of drivers underreport their annual mileage to insurance companies. A quarter of them understate their mileage by 6,000 miles or more, according to a study by the California Department of Insurance. Clearly, this is not a small issue. Quite the contrary, underreported mileage causes the insurance industry to lose billions of dollars every year. Finding a solution is important and long overdue.

How can I avoid it?

The path to avoiding underreported miles is simple: Use a car’s actual odometer reading instead of relying on self-reporting and other tamper-prone solutions. Smartcar provides a mileage verification solution that lets insurance companies access their policyholders’ actual odometer readings. Here’s how it works:

Using our API technology, insurance businesses can let policyholders link their cars to an insurance application. The app can then regularly read mileage information from the policyholder’s car. This pure software solution brings multiple benefits compared to self-reported mileage and hardware alternatives:

No self-reporting

With Smartcar’s solution, insurance providers can easily and automatically read a policyholder’s odometer every year, every month, or however often is necessary. Policyholders won’t have to look up how much they drove, and they won’t be able to rig their mileage information in any way. Insurance companies will never have to deal with soft fraud or tamper again.

Accuracy

Smartcar’s technology communicates directly with 3G and 4G telematics modems that are built into vehicles. It allows insurance apps to access a car’s true odometer reading, eliminating all forms of inaccuracy and all risks of failure. Using this reliable information, insurance businesses can finally achieve correct pricing and underwriting.

No dependency on aftermarket hardware or smartphones

As self-reported mileage is becoming less and less popular, alternative solutions have entered the market. Some insurance providers ask their policyholders to install OBD-II dongles or other aftermarket hardware in their vehicles in order to automatically read and report mileage. The use of a policyholder’s smartphone for the same purpose is another prominent solution.

Smartcar’s pure software product is entirely different from both of these methods. First, both OBD dongles and smartphones are inaccurate when reporting mileage, as they merely estimate the number of miles driven on the basis of location and trip data. Neither aftermarket hardware nor phones are able to access a vehicle’s true odometer reading. Second, policyholders can still commit tamper by unplugging OBD devices and turning off their phones. Third, both solutions are prone to unintentional underreporting, namely when a hardware device gets knocked out of place and when a policyholder’s phone battery dies from constantly reporting its location in the background.

This is why underreported mileage poses a big problem to auto insurance companies and how Smartcar’s mileage verification solution alleviates the problem. If you have any questions about our product or would like to request a demo, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’re happy to help!

Originally published at smartcar.com on September 11, 2019.

How your insurance company can avoid underreported mileage was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every workplace is different. Each company has their very own history, organizational structure, values, and culture. While a company’s leaders are responsible for ensuring certain core values, all team members contribute their own perspectives and experiences, creating a unique company culture.

Job applicants often ask us what Smartcar’s company values are and what our company culture looks like. This blog post series will provide you some insight, guided by our core values: balance, purpose, empowerment, and respect.

Are you wondering how we achieve work-life balance and how we promote a happy, healthy work environment? Then this “balance” blog post is for you — just keep on reading!

Balance at Smartcar

Work-life balance 🌴

There is a common misconception that people at startups are overworked and burnt-out. That’s just not the case at Smartcar. Having a healthy work-life balance is super important to us. Our flexible PTO policy allows everyone to take the time they need to recharge, explore the world, and see their families. We’ve gone to some pretty cool places recently. Have a look!

Health & fitness 🚴‍♀️

We want everyone at Smartcar to be and stay healthy. This is why we offer a variety of health, dental, and vision plans for team members to choose from. In our free time, you will find many of us exercising, playing sports, and enjoying the outdoors. Sometimes, we spontaneously sign up for boxing classes or go on group hikes together.

Happiness 😄

A healthy employee is a happy employee. At our office, we’ve created a space where our team can be comfortable, productive, and creative. Our flexible office furniture ranges from standing tables to couches and from quiet areas to patio seating. There’s simply no room for monotony at Smartcar! In case you get hungry, we offer a pantry full of healthy snacks, a fridge full of La Croix, plenty of coffee, and (of course) free catered lunches!

Dog-friendly office 🐶

Dogs are part of the Smartcar family. Every Thursday and Friday are take-your-dog-to-work days at our office. We encourage games of fetch and walks outside, helping dogs and team members alike to get a break from the day-to-day. Our office dogs are even invited to company offsites!

Team building 🙌

Every quarter, Smartcar organizes team bonding activities that allow everyone to get out of the office, have fun, and get to know each other better. We believe that regular company offsites foster trust and communication between colleagues. We really find that it works, and also, it’s just a lot of fun.

This is how we create a balanced company culture at Smartcar. Stay tuned for further blog posts about our three other company values, and feel free to reach out to our People & Operations team with any questions. We’d love to chat!

Originally published at https://smartcar.com on September 5, 2019.

Smartcar’s company culture: How we’re creating a balanced work environment was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whether we’re looking at pay-per-mile products, usage-based pricing, or traditional policies, mileage verification plays an important role in all kinds of auto insurance products. Many insurance companies use aftermarket hardware like OBD-II dongles to verify mileage. Here’s what this hardware solution lacks and how you can use a successful software-based alternative.

Why OBD-II dongles are bad at verifying mileage

While on-board diagnostics dongles are versatile and useful for tracking and diagnostics of many kinds, they are far from ideal when it comes to mileage verification.

• Inaccuracy: It might surprise you, but on-board diagnostics dongles aren’t able to access a vehicle’s actual odometer reading. Instead, OBD dongles calculate a car’s approximate mileage information based on its location as well as the start and end of the driver’s trips. As you can imagine, inferring mileage from location and trips comes with inevitable inaccuracies. On top of that, if the dongle wrongly detects the start or end of a trip, small imprecisions can turn into significant errors.
• Inconvenience and unintentional failure: OBD-II dongles, like all hardware devices, require to be correctly installed and used. Policyholders have to wait for a package in the mail and spend time installing the device in their vehicle. This lengthy onboarding process will cause many prospects to drop off, if it doesn’t discourage them from requesting a quote in the first place. Once installed, devices can easily fail due to a loose connection or if customers accidentally knock them out of place. Finally, OBD dongles can draw too much power and cause a customer’s car battery to die.
• Intentional tamper: Beyond the risk of incorrect installation and unintentional failure, some customers will deliberately commit mileage fraud. Policyholders might unplug their device before going on a long trip, and your product will take some time to detect the tamper. By the time your customer re-installs the dongle, they might have driven 10 miles or 500 miles. In hindsight, you won’t be able to determine this number, let alone the amount of premium leakage caused to your company.
• Privacy concerns: As consumer privacy is becoming an increasingly pressing issue, insurance companies have a hard time gaining their customers’ trust. Policyholders are skeptical towards constant tracking, and with good cause. OBD devices are essentially black boxes that provide little transparency about the kind of information they collect, how it gets passed on to the insurance company, and how it is being used.
• High expenses: Finally, OBD-II dongles are a significant cost factor. Your business will have to purchase OBD devices, ship them to policyholders, and replace them in case of damage or loss. If customers switch to a different insurance provider before your business has recovered the initial hardware cost, your profits will be dropping, not rising.

Why APIs are great at verifying mileage

As cars are becoming increasingly internet-connected, we don’t always have to depend on hardware to do the things that matter most. Smartcar is only one example of a pure software alternative that uses API technology to offer the perfect mileage verification solution to auto insurance companies.

• Accurate: APIs return a car’s real odometer reading — not an estimate of how far the vehicle has travelled based on trips and location. Your business will be able to finally provide precise pricing and underwriting, while your customers will never again complain about inaccurately reported mileage.
• Easy to use and reliable: Smartcar’s onboarding process takes just a few clicks from any mobile or web app. Customers will no longer have to wait to receive a device in the mail. They won’t have to install any hardware in their vehicle, but will simply log into their existing car account and accept a list of permissions. Once that’s done, customers won’t need to worry about incorrect installations, loose connections, or dead car batteries.
• Tamper-resistant: With a pure software solution, your insurance product will be able to read a car’s actual odometer regularly and automatically. Customers won’t be able to commit mileage fraud, because they won’t be able to hide or rig any information. This way, you won’t ever need to worry about lost profits from premium leakage again.
• Privacy first: Our onboarding flow with granular permissions puts transparency and user privacy first. Customers will see exactly which information your insurance app is asking for (e.g. a vehicle’s odometer, location, or fuel tank level). With the push of a button, they can choose to accept or deny this list of permissions.
• Cost efficient: Smartcar offers simple SaaS pricing that scales and adjusts to your needs. You won’t spend time and money on hardware devices, shipping, replacements, and repairs. Instead, your company will be able to save up and spend more time on the important thing: building incredible insurance experiences for your customers.

This is why and how software solutions make verifying mileage successful and easy for your insurance company. Have any questions about Smartcar or would like to request a demo? Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’re happy to help!

Originally published at https://smartcar.com on September 3, 2019.

Why you shouldn’t use OBD-II dongles to verify mileage was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We sometimes get asked: “Is Smartcar a data marketplace?” The answer is no.

Smartcar is an automotive developer platform. It is not an automotive data marketplace. It never has been one, nor will it ever become one.

We’re used to getting asked whether Smartcar is a data marketplace. This question comes up from time to time in our meetings with customers, partners, OEMs, analysts, and VCs. It’s a fair question to ask, as topics like data monetization have become a popular focus in the automotive tech world. However, it’s important to understand the difference between a data marketplace and a developer platform.

What is an automotive data marketplace?

On any marketplace, there are sellers and buyers. The good being sold and bought on a data marketplace happens to be data. In the past few years, several well-funded companies have built marketplaces for car data. Those platforms, often also referred to as data exchanges, enable companies that generate automotive data sets to sell it to interested buyers.

More often than not, the automotive data that is being sold on these new types of marketplaces belongs to consumers who have unknowingly signed away their rights when using certain products and services. While some new platforms incorporate anonymization techniques before selling the data, there is still something fundamentally controversial about selling consumer data without giving consumers a choice and without being 100 percent transparent about it.

What is an automotive developer platform?

Empowering developers

A developer platform is fundamentally different from a data exchange. It is a collection of tools and resources for software engineers to easily integrate with a family of products. For example, Stripe makes it easy for developers to integrate with every credit card processor. Plaid makes it easy for developers to integrate with any bank. Smartcar makes it easy to integrate with any car.

We provide developers with friendly API documentation and SDKs to integrate mobility apps with cars of any brand. Without our platform, developers would have to spend months building dozens of custom integrations for each and every car brand.

Developer platforms do not facilitate letting companies sell their customer data to others. Neither does Smartcar.

Empowering consumers

Apart from offering resources to software engineers, developer platforms also empower consumers to choose the apps they want to use and to consent to specific permissions. At Smartcar, we let vehicle owners link their cars to the apps of their choice, and we let them review a specific set of permissions for each app (e.g. vehicle location, odometer, fuel tank level).

Smartcar is not a data marketplace

Here’s what we say when companies reach out to us with the following questions:

• “Can we buy vehicle data from Smartcar?” — No.
• “Can you send us a car’s location or odometer if we provide a VIN?” — No.
• “Does Smartcar sell bulk vehicle data sets?” — No.
• “How about anonymous data sets, are those for sale?” — No.
• “Has Smartcar ever sold customer data in the past?” — No.

Smartcar’s mission is to empower developers to build the future of mobility. We believe that the best products do not come at the cost of consumer privacy. This is why Smartcar is a developer platform.

Originally published at https://smartcar.com on August 28, 2019.

Is Smartcar an automotive data marketplace? was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read on for more details, or launch the dashboard to explore the improvements we’ve made 🎉

Here’s what’s new:

Configure multiple apps

You can now create and manage multiple application configurations in our dashboard.

Simplified app configuration

From redirect uris to our demo app, view everything you need to integrate with Smartcar in one place.

If you have feature requests or feedback (positive, negative, or anything in between!), you can find us at support@smartcar.com or message us directly on Twitter. We read every message and are always (more than) happy to help 💖

Originally published at smartcar.com on July 25, 2018.

Announcing multi-application support was originally published in Smartcar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.