Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Luke Schneider, CEO of Silvercar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have described the user experience from the consumer’s point of view. Can you explain the engineering of this? What’s going on where?

Luke Schneider: What seems simple on the surface is complex on the inside. It required us to solve a lot of problems. One of the reasons why we chose Audi is that each vehicle has a controller area network in it. There is literally, in case of an A4, about seven controller area networks running everything from the power train to the entertainment system. With a simple piece of hardware that plugs into a 10-pin connector, we tap into that network. It communicates with that car through a phone. At the same time, we’re communicating with cloud servers over wireless. Essentially, that’s how that customer is able to access their vehicle. That’s the iceberg analogy.

That consumer experience is the tip of that iceberg because on the back-end, our systems are actually managing the locations of that inventory, the status of those individual cars as well as all of the reservations that are poured into the system and each one of those potential or actual users. We’re managing a CRM flow or a fleet management aspect on the back-side. Custom support happens through the back-end application. We’re an asset-intensive business. We buy hundreds of cars every month. We in-fleet and de-fleet them. We re-market them. We have an acquisition and disposition model at the back to help us manage those assets and ensure that we’re getting good leverage out of them.

Sramana Mitra: You are not selling technology to other car rental companies. You’re running a car rental service with these properties yourself, using Audi A4 cars.

Luke Schneider: Absolutely. We buy the cars. We run the brick-and-mortar locations where we service and process those cars. We employ the people and the concierges that deliver the service. We developed the mobile technology and the web technology. That is the primary business. Additionally, we sell the technology as a standalone component to other customers as well. I’ve been in transportation for 20 years. I started my career as an engineer at Ford, designing engines. In my last company, I was the CTO at a company called Zipcar. The underlying technology and operations model for shared transportation in all of its forms, whether its airport car rental or urban car sharing, are remarkably similar. The underlying technology to support those things needs to do a few things differently, but it essentially amounts to use cases.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Luke Schneider, CEO of Silvercar
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