Never miss a maintenance and service check for your car: vehicle intelligence company Spireon of Irvine is ready to help keep your appointments on track.
Spireon recently introduced MyDealer 2.0 for its Kahu GPS technology, providing automated vehicle maintenance and service reminders to customers, on behalf of their dealerships.
Customers can now receive tailored service reminders and have visibility into their car’s maintenance needs and history all in one place—their mobile phone. Service appointments also can be scheduled directly from the product’s app.
“There is no incremental cost to any of our current customers. It’s included with the current service. We expect it to be very well received,” Spireon Automotive President Brian Skutta told the Business Journal.
“The consumer is guaranteed to get all the necessary updates without relying on the dealer,” Skutta said. “We handle that for them with our technology and then the vehicle’s service history is actually populated back to their app.”
Spireon presented MyDealer 2.0 for Kahu at last month’s National Automotive Dealership Association Show 2020 in Las Vegas.
The pricing is set by participating dealers. “Generally speaking, consumers purchase the service anywhere from a 1- to 5-year term and the participating dealers set the price,” Skutta said.
MyDealer 2.0 also works with pickups and light trucks. The program works with all makes and models.
Fully Connected
Founded in 2002, Spireon provides technology for vehicles to wirelessly give owners useful information such as location and battery health. Its 4 million subscribers include consumers, auto loan lenders, car dealers, rental car agencies, and commercial fleet operators.
MyDealer 2.0 is Spireon’s latest step in making sure vehicles of all types are fully connected.
The company in November introduced a new set of tools to help commercial trucking firms deal with ever-increasing amounts of data needed for trailer management.
Spireon said last summer it was partnering with Ford to improve productivity and profitability offer for select commercial fleets of cars, vans and trucks. The system, called FleetLocate for Ford, offers access to GPS tracking technology, mobile asset management and driver behavior monitoring, without the need to retrofit vehicles with hardware.
With the latest MyDealer development, rather than getting a vehicle service record printout from the dealership that car owners will “probably shove into the glove box,” the information will now be digitized “so consumers will have access to a complete history of maintenance done on their car in the Kahu app.”
MyDealer Benefits
Skutta added: “The major advantage of MyDealer is having access to the most relevant, accurate maintenance schedules for when to bring a car in for service. It’s not based on estimated values.”
“Because Kahu leverages the actual mileage of the vehicle, we’re able to customize and personalize maintenance reminders and dealership marketing promotions,” according to Skutta. “Car owners won’t get untimely and irrelevant information.”
The new automated service also greatly simplifies things for dealers who can now provide “more thorough service than they have in the past.”
“One of the big advantages of Kahu for dealerships is the ability to maintain an ongoing service relationship with the customer through a mobile app, which is really how consumers consume most of their information today,” he said.
So, with all this information on your car, could the data be used by law enforcement or civil legal proceedings?
“This sort of technology can be used in certain legal proceedings but it’s situational. It has a lot to do with privacy rights,” Skutta said. “In a certain situation the data could be relevant to that.”
Digital Wallet
“What we really want to do is to take their car ownership experience and put it into a digital wallet in the form of our Kahu app. And this is just another feature along that line.
“Dealers no longer have to manually create service retention push campaigns as Kahu automatically generates and sends those messages to customers,” the company said. “This ultimately reduces overhead cost of service engagements and enhances fixed operations profit.”
