Skymeter is a service designed to pay for use of a car.
This may include renting, leasing or sharing a car, or sharing a ride.
Even maintenance and repairs insurance is possible.
There are many different strategies to allow drivers and passengers to share or lease cars. Each is known by a different name. From the point of view of a metering service provider they look very similar: they are all variations of paying for rides in a car. All are easily enabled by Skymeter: a service designed to pay for use of a car.
Skymeter Enables Car Sharing and Distributed Car Sharing
Car sharing typically refers to an unattended car rental program. You join a club, and are issued a security card to access cars with. You then reserve your car online (ahead of time or onsite), swipe a security card, enter and drive. When you no longer need the car, close the reservation, park and walk away. Skymeter enables all of the above with a low-cost, mass-market system designed for rapid deployment.
In a variation called distributed car sharing, private citizens can rent out their cars when they are not using them. The biggest challenge it faces is insuring these cars for the rentals: more driving means more accidents, and renters may be riskier drivers than the owner. Insurers understandably want these risks paid for. Usage-based insurance, enabled by the Skymeter car-sharing system, solves this problem. The additional insurance can be calculated on vehicle usage and the driver's known record, corrected for the demonstrated behavior on the drive itself. This insurance cost can then be added to the renter's bill, and paid to the insurance company on the car owner's behalf.
Use of any Skymeter-enabled car can also included automatic payment of all street parking, and all tolls.
Skymeter Enables Car Rentals and Leasing
Car rentals and leasing can be seen as variations on car sharing with longer time durations and attended pickup. Here you pay for exclusive use of a car on a daily, monthly or yearly basis. With Skymeter, rather than being based solely on time (hours or days), the rental price can include usage-based factors, matching the cost of the rental to the wear and tear on the car. You may pay per mile, with a premium for driving off-road, and discounts for driving in a non-aggressive manner that extends the car's lifespan.
Rental insurance rates can be calculated for each car rental based on usage and driver behavior. This allows rental agencies to price their insurance so as to be attractive to the driver, yet still be profitable for the vehicle owner.
Skymeter can also provide a full (location-anonymous) usage history for maintenance purposes. This allows car renters or leasers to properly maintain and optimize the final sales price of the used vehicle. It may even be valuable in increasing the resale value of the final car, by providing further information and guarantees to the buyer.
Skymeter Enables Maintenance and Repairs Insurance
A full, Skymeter-enabled, location-anonymous usage history can allow dealerships to offer car buyers maintenance and repairs insurance. For a monthly fee, based on your usage of the car, you can have all your maintenance and repairs covered for free. Meanwhile, the dealership can ensure that all maintenance and repairs come back to the dealer - since they are part of the maintenance package price - rather than going to non-affiliated repair shops.
Skymeter Supports Ride Sharing and Carpooling
There are many good application-software systems developed to encourage ride sharing and carpooling: combining drivers and passengers so that more than one person can take advantage of a car's trip. There are two challenges to having such systems be used more: financial fairness and security.
To take part in a Skymeter-enabled ride sharing or carpooling system a passenger would be issued with a wireless ID, such as an RFID card. As a passenger boards and leaves each enabled vehicle, they would use the card to register their entrance and departure from the vehicle. Skymeter's financial grade capabilities can then calculate the cost of the ride automatically, including all tolls. The price of the ride can then be transferred from the passenger's account to the driver's account, less a small administration fee. This automatically addresses the financial fairness aspect.
Security concerns are also potentially addressed by Skymeter's interaction with the wireless ID card. The passenger's card can be read by the driver before entering the car. If the passenger is not validated by the Skymeter system, the driver can refuse to let them in.
A series of added security features are also possible, such as biometric identification and confirmation of the identity of the driver to the passenger. Systems that use a mobile phone in place of an ID card are also possible. The details of such potential features and applications can be discussed with Skymeter's research and development team.
The Advantages of Skymeter for Car and Ride Sharing and Leasing
Skymeter's metering service is designed for use in mass-market applications such as parking and insurance. These applications demand a low-cost system that can be easily installed in minutes and even self-installed. Bringing the same technology to car sharing and leasing allows all the service benefits above at a fraction of the cost of single-purpose devices.
Other services can easily be layered on top of the core sharing and leasing capability. For instance, the firm that offers a monthly car lease can also sell usage-based accident insurance or repairs insurance to the same drivers. Even parking and tolling can be collected, allowing a dealership or rental agency to be a full transport service entity, collecting all of a driver's transport related costs via one bill.