Carsharing Innovation

The car sharing platform sharoo needed three things to stand out from the crowd: a flexible way of sharing to help car owners develop the level of trust of sharing their car by limiting the scope of potential renters, something we implemented as 'social circles'. This allowed owners to pick whether they only wanted friends and family, their neighbourhood, everyone in their town, or the whole world to be able to rent their car. We also implemented a flexible scheduling tool to allow setting explicit renting times.

Another important topic to tackle was the entry barrier for car owners. As cars need keys, car owners needed to either pass their keys onto the renter, making themselves available at unwanted times. For this we found a solution in the OBD system available in all cars produced after 1984. This system operated on the CAN protocol and in many cars allowed access to a lot of actuators in the car, including the doors. By hacking ourselves through the undocumented connections, we managed to automatically open the majority of car systems with a small computer that any car owner could simply plug in to the OBD system.

The last important problem to tackle was a security problem. If a car is parked in a cellar or a concrete building, the micro computer that allowed opening the car, could not verify whether a user wanting access was actually entitled to. For this we created a patented authentication logic using the onion pattern to implement a security which at all times only allowed a valid user to access the car.