CalAmp and tech start up, Coastr, partner to revolutionize the worldwide car rental industry

CalAmp, a global technology solutions pioneer transforming the mobile connected economy and Coastr, a digital car rental innovator formerly known as Nuvven, announced a partnership that promises to disrupt the car rental business worldwide. Coastr is aiming to do to the car rental industry what Uber did for taxi hire.

With a focus on creating an integrated digital ecosystem by equipping car rental operators with advanced technological innovations and infrastructure, Coastr is transforming car rental businesses into fully flexible and contactless models designed to make the car rental experience more convenient for consumers and businesses and thus increasing market share for car rental agencies.

“Coastr strives to offer a simplified and engaging experience to the industry as a whole,” said founder, Biswajit Kundu Roy, himself a passionate traveller. “I’ve had many frustrating car rental experiences myself and know many others who’ve endured similar situations.”

By adopting the CalAmp Telematics Cloud (CTC) and edge computing on-board diagnostics (OBD) technology, Coastr and CalAmp are helping to fully digitize the car rental businesses and compete with major market players across Europe, the Middle East, Australia and the United States. CalAmp’s innovative CTC technology and intelligent edge devices harness the powers of connectivity, Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics and edge computing. Mobile asset management of Coastr rental vehicles via CTC and OBD telematics expands its ability to understand, analyse and gain intelligence across a mixed fleet of vehicles with real-time data pertaining to battery health, crash event, road traffic, location, predictive maintenance and servicing–and even door lock and unlock information.

“An integral part of Coastr’s revolutionary technology is the tracking and usage data that we derive from the broad fleet of vehicles operated by car rental businesses,” adds Rishabh Makrand, Coastr’s director of engineering and technology. “We knew that the telematics devices that record this data would be essential in building these new-age features for our platform, and by using CalAmp’s CTC platform and IoT devices, Coastr has developed a game-changing, on-demand fleet insurance which is usage based and set to revolutionise the car rental industry.”

Coastr, with the support of CalAmp, aims to solve operator and customer experiences through an integrated, user-friendly web-based software for the operator and a new-age customer booking app powered by CalAmp’s connected vehicle technology and AI. As a result, car rental companies will benefit from digitization and expanded customer reach, while end-customers benefit from greater choice and digital, contactless rental services. Working with CalAmp, Coastr is enabling car rental companies to expand their businesses through data-driven decision making and automation, which ultimately leads to improved efficiency, reduced costs and increased fleet utilization.

“With the CalAmp Telematics Cloud, we can help companies like Coastr reduce the cost and complexity of developing custom solutions that solve complex mobile asset management problems,” said Arym Diamond, chief revenue officer for CalAmp. “CTC provides access to a rich software development environment and valuable telematics services that can rapidly scale and connect to support the management of thousands or even millions of vehicles as Coastr grows.”

This forward-thinking partnership will bring a host of benefits to car rental companies and their business and consumer customers. This dedicated collaboration has already earned Coastr a couple of prestigious grants. These grants will allow Coastr to execute its ambitious vision of cost reductions, higher fleet utilization and empowering businesses with future-proof technology.

Why the grants count:

• The Scottish Enterprise Innovation Grant encourages and supports ambitious projects on technology and will help to create this revolutionary on-demand fleet insurance solution.
• The Innovate UK Grant is only awarded to a handful of projects with ground-breaking potential to make future advancements in innovation, such as Coastr’s keyless entry solution for contactless rentals.