The joint livestream between Grab and Toyota Motors reveals quite an announcement. Through the collaboration with Grab, Toyota is leveraging their competitive advantages, such as the Toyota Production System and technologies in vehicle connectivity.
For a start, Toyota will start offering what they call “Total-care Service” to Grab.
This is a service in which Toyota’s dealers and ride-hailing businesses such as Grab will use shared vehicle data on a common information platform, to provide various ride-hailing-related services such as fleet management, automotive insurance and vehicle maintenance.
Toyota will be offering this “Total-care Service,” for the first time anywhere in the world, to 1,500 vehicles owned by Grab Rentals in Singapore. In short, this service uses vehicle data from Toyota’s in-vehicle data transmission drive recorder (Translog) to report abnormalities to Grab. By combining this with video footage, Grab can determine what sort of support to give the driver.
Another case is to advise drivers based on their driving behaviors as TransLog can obtain vehicle information. Toyota leaves it to Grab to leverage their technologies to offer their drivers and users safer rides with peace of mind when using Grab.
This driving data can also be used by to influence on certain automotive insurance policies.
Vehicle maintenance is also essential as it is reported that ride-hailing vehicles use around five times more mileage than privately-owned vehicles. Hence these vehicles require maintenance more frequently.
Therefore, it is critical to keep these vehicles in a safe condition through timely and high-quality maintenance. It is also important to minimize vehicle downtime by enhancing maintenance efficiency. That is why Toyota are working to use data on driving patterns and vehicle health for optimizing maintenance schedule and reducing vehicle downtime. For details, take a look at the video.
Having both “vehicle information” and “maintenance history information” will allow for extension of vehicle and parts lifetime via advice to drivers and optimized vehicle maintenance.
Toyota are in further discussion with Grab to take this Total-care Service to more Grab-owned vehicles across Southeast Asia in phases.
