Building the business case for telematics based diagnostics at Mahindra Reva

Abstract

Mahindra Reva began a program of developing telematics capabilities in its electric vehicles around 4 years ago. The primary motivation for considering this technology was to enable remote diagnostics capabilities for our cars that are spread over 24 countries. This paper describes the evolution of telematics enabled capabilities at Mahindra Reva. This paper is divided into four broad sections: (1) we first present a technical overview of the telematics system; (2) we then briefly describe the categories of beneficiaries of telematics and the features and benefits to each category; (3) we then present the results from a survey of our existing battery electric vehicle owners on their perceived utility for such features; (4) based on these we develop a simple cost-benefit analysis to enable investment decisions in this technology and understand the payoffs from the investment.