On the 18th of April 2019, the IT team lead at the BMW Group of Singapore, Cihan Albay, introduced the company’s VerifyCar app during the VeChain Summit in San Francisco.
This application is meant to act as a digital passport for vehicles on the blockchain and has been developed through a bilateral collaboration of the firm with VeChain, a blockchain startup that focuses mainly on managing the supply chain.
The application aims to mitigate the problem of odometer fraudulence, which is a widespread problem in Germany, with almost thirty-three percent (33%) of the 2nd hand vehicles have odometers that have been tampered with.
The average impact of this fraud is estimated to be somewhere close to six billion Euros (EUR 6b) annually.
The leader of the IT team expressed in his talk with the audience at the event that the application comes as an effort by the firm to provide a digital ID, verifying datasets that enable people to ensure the validity of the seller.
He said, that the firm developed a digital ledger on VeChain. There is a specific hash key for interaction with each vehicle in the blockchain which ranges from changing the battery, filter or getting yearly service, etc. All the vehicles have SIM cards that regularly send datasets which are stored and verified.
The app has undergone many trials for internal vehicles and BMW is trying to figure out a way to roll out this product currently. This application is one of the many blockchain-based initiatives by BMW during the past year.
