The Digital Car Passport

The automotive industry
to build the digital car passport

Learn how The Blockchain Xdev in conjonction with IRT SystemX federated big names of the automotive industry to build a blockchain-based trustful car data platform.

“La réflexion sur le partage des données, son articulation entre la libre concurrence et la coopération entre les différents acteurs apporte une vision totalement nouvelle et conquérante pour l’ensemble de la filière automobile.

C’est la raison pour laquelle j’apporte mon soutien à ce projet très intéressant pour la filière automobile, notre économie et notre souveraineté.”

Laure de La Raudière
Député d’Eure-et-Loir

“This collaborative approach to sharing vehicle data is unprecedented in Europe.”

Charles Kremer
CEO The Blockchain Xdev

The Passport for Connected Car (PCC)
initiative is led by The Blockchain Xdev and IRT SystemX

It’s supported by a consortium of companies in the automobile industry and insurance – including PSA, Mobivia, COVEA (MAAF, MMA, GMF), Matmut, Crédit Agricole Pacifica, Inter Mutuel Assistance.

According to the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile), more than 15% of vehicles circulating in Europe were subject to mileage frauds in 2018. This impacts the entire automobile industry negatively. On the second-hand market, car re-sellers suffer from price devaluation and car buyers incur higher risk due to this breach of trust. Insurance companies are struggling to evaluate the risks of breakdowns, and repair agents don’t have the correct information to work efficiently.

The lack of reliability and traceability on the vehicle life cycle data also hinders all service providers in the development of new services such as predictive maintenance or personalized insurance.

  • The challenge

    Bring together the automotive players to create a Connected Vehicle Passport that securely tracks and certifies all maintenance and upkeep data.
  • The outcome

    Validation of a common product vision (POC) and publication of a white paper that define the roadmap to lead the consortium.
  • The solution

    A blockchain-based trustful car data platform

Obstacles to better use of valuable data

The vehicle’s maintenance record suffers from several weaknesses:

Information registered in maintenance record is not digitized.

Lack of trust on mileage claims on the second-hand market.

Lack of trust about maintenance and upkeep on cars when re-selling.

The car manufacturer has no visibility on interventions outside its network.

Maintenance record information is not shared with insurers or other service providers.

Some cars declared as wrecked go back on the road.

Make reliable data accessible to all companies within the consortium

Our ambition is to develop a blockchain-based system that creates a secured and accurate maintenance record for the lifecycle of each car:

Create a Car Passport: its information (mileage, maintenance, accidents…) is secured and can be shared among the stakeholders of the consortium.

Share car management information: mileage is shared automatically by the connected cars to the car passport, preventing odometer fraud. Interventions, even outside the car’s manufacturer network, are stored in car passport. Insurance processes for declaring incidents and wreckage are handled within the same system that is shared among the consortium.

Develop new services: the consortium can grow by integrating new service providers such as new insurance policies based on the shared information, and so on.

A platform designed for industry collaboration

The Blockchain Xdev overcame several technical challenges:

Network incentives: ​Effective collaboration relies on alignment of interest and well-designed incentive schemes. We have set a dual token economy, pegged to the Euro, in order to incentivize data sharing amongst the stakeholders (PCC_token) and enforce fair governance and repartition of costs and benefits amongst the consortium members (PCC_gold token).

Reliability: The system is fed with manual input of data into the shared ledger by different members of the ecosystem. In order to maximize data collection, and hence optimize data valuation, we have introduced the notion of quality index attached to each source. All events and measures recorded in the blockchain will always be associated to this quality index.

Confidentiality & Dynamic Access Control​: Information on a Blockchain is accessible among all its participants. However, some critical data fields are not meant to be shared widely. Moreover, these access rights have to be updatable. We have proposed a new on-chain protocol based on cryptography to implement dynamic access control.

RGPD compliance​: Private information such as the vehicle identification number or its owner’s identity cannot be stored on the Blockchain according to the CNIL (French data protection authority). We have hence developed a protocol to match on-chain and off-chain data.

Performance & Data market performance: In order to increase performance of the queries within the data marketplace, we have built the data pipeline using a Lambda architecture, designed to handle massive quantities of data by taking advantage of both ​batch​ and ​stream-processing​ methods.

Interoperability & Integration: the system has to interact with the IT systems of PSA Groupe as well as that of all the other consortium members.

“This project is very ambitious because it builds the foundations of a sovereign architecture of reference for the automotive industry.”

Abdelkrim Doufene
Director of Strategy and Programs at IRT SystemX

New horizons for car owners
and the automotive industry

We have demonstrated how to make existing markets more reliable and have opened up to new opportunities by building the grounds for a large, secure, and fair market data platform. Information that was previously collected and stored in a silo by each market player, can now be shared in a collaborative approach, allowing all players to build new customized added-value services. The blockchain architecture ensures the security and sovereignty of the data collected and allows an efficient and fair re-distribution of the value created using tokens.

After a successful POC, The Blockchain Xdev and IRT SystemX developed a MVP launched end of 2020. The initiative is documented in a white paper « Passeport du Véhicule Connecté, bénéfices de la Blockchain ».

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