Context & R&D challenge
Total wanted to enrich its Total Service mobile app to make it the vehicle's « health record », automatically surfacing key information to users (fuel consumption, mileage, maintenance due dates) without manual entry.
The challenge: collect the information directly from the vehicle, recurrently and automatically, via a low-cost, standard solution compatible with most vehicles and installable by the general public. Total entrusted Steamulo with a POC (Proof of Concept) to demonstrate the feasibility of collecting, formatting and displaying the data in dashboards.
vehicles tested in real conditions
to obtain a measurement
target maximum cost of the dongle
A 4-step R&D approach
Choosing the technical solution
Defining criteria, researching and qualifying vehicle-data collection solutions (app-only, eBeacon, OBD2 dongle, CAN dongle), then validating with Total.
Solution benchmark
Lab testing
Client validation
The technical choice: the CAN dongle
Four options were studied: the mobile app alone (GPS/accelerometer, unreliable), the eBeacon tag, the OBD2 dongle (a standard but does not return mileage) and the CAN dongle. The latter, connecting to the vehicle's CAN bus, is the only solution able to return a reliable mileage value without device-side calculation.
The Smarto supplier's solution (flat dongle, broad compatibility, webservice configuration) was chosen. Real-condition tests confirmed readings matching the dashboard and an average retrieval time of 3 seconds, paving the way for potential industrialisation.
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