Rollr Mini - A Completely Made In India Product

To ensure safety for you and your vehicle, on days when your car breaks down or when you travel through dark and intimidating roads - a GPS system becomes crucial for the car.

So here we introduce Rollr Mini - it goes beyond just being a GPS system. It is a vehicle diagnostics device to keep you updated on whatever happens under the umbrella. To add on, it helps in improving your cars’ health, by telling you how well you drive, and how you can drive better.

To understand more about the Rollr Mini app we held a discussion with Amit Upadhyay, Chief Technology Officer, Motherson Invenzen XLab.

Let's read on to see what he had to say:

What makes your product unique? How do you plan to compete with your competitors?

One of the key differentiators of Rollr is that we have built the entire product life-cycle in-house – starting from hardware design, applications design, manufacturing, testing and marketing. Since we do this all in-house – we have strict control over the product quality that the end user gets.

Secondly, coming from Motherson Group background – which has decades of experience in supplying to car manufacturers, we have the know-how and experience of working with OEM customers – the same experience we have put in Rollr Mini.

Please give a brief overview of the product.

We have 3 broad category of offerings – for Vehicle Manufacturers (OEMs), Businesses & B2C customers. For each of the three segments – the core of our offering is the complete telematics platform – starting from Hardware to Applications.

For OEM’s we build customized telematics products. We will be seeing connected vehicle technology being rolled out directly from OEMs very soon and we are working with several of our OEM customers for introducing telematics in their vehicles.

Most of our business customers are using our Fleet management solution wherein they are able to monitor their fleet of vehicles in real-time –thus improving their operational efficiency and provide better/on-time service to their own customers.  

For retail users – one of the key offerings is the Rollr Mini.

This plug-and-play device fits the car's On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) port and can start functioning in a matter of a few steps. The USP of Rollr Mini is that it’s a completely Made-in-India product with state-of-the-art quality and built and tested on 100’s of Indian cars models – including high-end luxury cars". The gadget comes with an embedded SIM card with a pre-activated plan.

You will need to download the Rollr mobile App to activate the device. As soon as you plug-in the device and activate it, you are ready to roll with Rollr. You can keep a constant tab on your vehicle's navigation route as well as the driving incidents if someone else is driving it. In case of any vehicle engine malfunctions, you get an alert immediately and can find the root cause of the issue.

The driving behaviour rating is a unique feature – it not only ensures the safety of your car – but also improves your fuel efficiency. It comes in a dashboard view on the app with an overall driving skills rating out of 10 for each trip, along with other information such as harsh braking and over-speeding. This feature is indispensable if you have hired a driver or if your teenage kids are learning to drive".  It also comes with a shared access feature in which all family members can access a car’s data.

How is it different from your competitors?

There are several differentiating factors – Our Telematics solutions go beyond simple tracking applications. It is able to provide a lot of value addition – in terms of analytics into the driving behaviour and vehicle health. Secondly, when it comes to quality – we take a lot of care in delivering a great user experience – example, our data transfers are almost done in real-time to provide accurate and seamless information to the users. We take utmost care and security of the vehicle and user’s data. Also, we are able to upgrade the devices over the air – which makes sure that our users are getting the latest feature upgrades.

What is the technological aspect of the app? Could you please also expand on the features of the app?

Broadly this comes under IoT technology umbrella - We use embedded connectivity and sensors in our hardware devices clubbed with server cloud-based technology to transfer data from the vehicles to end-users mobile phones. We use lots of additional sensors in our devices which can not only talk the vehicle’s ECUs but augment the vehicle data with other sensors such as the accelerometer, GPS etc.

Features of the App

• Real-time GPS Tracking and Location Analytics: Access your vehicle location & movement in real time. Get trips analytics like start & stop location, trips taken, total distances travelled in a week, month, timings, and route. With each trip, we also provide additional parameters such as RPM, Top-speed, avg. speed etc.
• Engine Health: Get insights into your car’s data like battery health, temperature, fuel levels and more.
• Security Alerts: With Rollr App set security alerts like geo-fence, vehicle start/stop & device unplugged alerts.
• Driving Behavior: Track how your car is being driven and monitor incidents like harsh brakes, idling & over speeding. All this information is then processed and you are assigned a Rollr Score. The Rollr score helps the user to improve the driving behaviour. Having a good driving score means safety and security of the car as well as you get better mileage if you drive your car well.
• Weekly Reporting: Apart from data access to all the above-mentioned data points, we also send a consolidated weekly email report that tells you a summary of the above points.

What are your business plans?

Our plan is to make Rollr a global telematics brand and serve a diverse customers base – from OEMs, B2B and retail users. We are already a supplier to some of the top vehicle manufacturers in India and hope to break through into many more OEMs.

We have partnerships with several customers and plan to reach out to many diverse businesses – because telematics finds a use case in almost all the businesses.

For retail users – we plan to make the Rollr Mini a ubiquitous consumer electronics device just like your smartphone.