Do you manage a fleet of vehicles for rental or ride-share services? You’ll know that maintenance costs can easily skyrocket, especially when a car is returned and you discover that it has been damaged or misused.

While solutions exist to help monitor these vehicles, it’s obvious that you can’t keep an eye on every single move of the driver, so you’ll never know how the last person used the car.

Bosch aims to solve that problem with its Ridecare solutions, which utilize a single sensor box. This box is extremely sensitive, with the ability to detect even minor scrapes like fender scuffs or underbody dings. It can even tell if an occupant has been smoking inside the vehicle during the rental period.

This data will be processed in the cloud using artificial intelligence, allowing the information to be interpreted in real time. This will allow the operator to determine whether the vehicle is still roadworthy, or if it will need repairs as soon as possible. This adds a layer of transparency between the renter and the rentee, and should help reduce ownership costs.

“In car sharing, one of the main keys to customer satisfaction is to ensure users have a safe and pleasant driving experience at all times. With its Ridecare solutions, Bosch is setting a new standard for an even better customer experience in the sharing market,” says Harald Kroeger, Robert Bosch GmbH board member.

Bosch is looking to have a pilot run of Ridecare with ride-share providers in Asia, North America, and Germany before it launches a production version of this system. It already has TÜV Süd certification, which confirms the reliability of the device and the service.