Car Rental

Rent a vehicle to a new driver every 3-4 days and multiply that by a fleet size in 10′s or 100′s of thousands and you end up with a very high volume of dings, dents, crashes, stolen vehicles, unauthorized drivers, late returns, and a best guess on the current status of your rentable inventory at any point in time. Add to that a crew of less than career-minded porters, and you have even more grey-area than a Detroit warehouse district on a cloudy day.

To control this constantly moving target, we have developed a line of Car Rental Vehicle Inspection Systems (CRVIS), a solution that is largely based on our popular digital camera lane technology. By utilizing high definition vehicle imaging and tagging the image sets to the vehicle’s license plate, the system is able to document the condition of your inventory as it flows through the exit and return lanes of your facilities.

Above and beyond the claims mitigation solution, the system provides more than dozen of additional features. For example, images can be exported to the used car dealer portals, alerts can be set to assist with customer service issues such as lost and found, security can confirm vehicle/passenger movement and vehicle inventory is better managed for service related issues.

The idea of documenting the physical condition of a vehicle in order to identify the origin of damage has become an industry hit ever since we invented (U.S. Patent Issue #6630893) and brought this technology to market back in early 2002.
 
 
 
The tubular structure shown above is our minimal rendition of a drive-thru lane set-up, which uses LPR (license plate recognition) to tag the vehicle passing thru at up to 75mph … well, 25mph if you are looking for sharp and not blurry images to go along with your plate. The software governing this process has a user interface that allows you (yes, you) to adjust the frame/second capture rate, to please your desire to end up with a few, many or lots of images per vehicle from every angle.

 

TunnelVision, as we have cleverly named the design shown below, serves to keep weather outside for a more optimal image quality. It too contains all the guts and glory of the other systems and can function as a stop-and-scan or a drive-thru device tagged by LPR. These are highly recommended for outdoor applications that have nothing but air between the vehicle and the clouds.
 
 
Below is another one of our many camera lane configurations. It’s a typical garage exit lay-out, most suited for a customer car leaving a covered facility through an unmanned lane, which requires the driver to identify him or herself before the gate will vend and clear the way for departure. The information collected by the reader (like the rental agreement barcode for example) will be tagged to the images that are being collected in an almost instant rapid fire fashion.
 
 
Reminiscent of the era when bands actually played on stage to sell their music, the truss lane design is for our more distinguished and mature clients who wish they would have become rock stars instead of gone into the car rental business. It provides essentially the same functionality as the preceding tubular lane design, except that it is prettier and … a little more expensive, as we’ve gone from 60′ of tubing with 3 welds, to 180′ of tubing with 149 welds.
 
 
For some of your slower rental facilities such as the off-airport operations that do not prompt for a permanent fixed lane installation, our damagepix product will allow you to close the loop using the latest in smart mobile technology, such as the iphone/pod/pad solution.

 

Record the license plate, VIN# or scan a vehicle rental barcode and start taking any number of pictures to record existing vehicle damage or its current condition, inside and out if you so desire.
 
 
The images are imprinted with the date, time, geo-tag info, facility code and attendant user name to create an official document that will serve as irrefutable evidence when needed. The program flow is very intuitive and highly visual, leaving nothing to interpret or decipher. The app is available at the itunes store for ease of deployment.
 
 
This visually rich image presentation is the user interface tool provided to demonstrate the ‘oopps – looks like you did it’ concept to the customer. The round thumbnail portholes represent the 8-camera views, although 4-6 is more standard in the industry. Selecting one puts it on the big screen, so you can start hunting for that little door-ding the customer insists already existed at time of rental. The capture tool enables you to create a snap-shot of the damage so you can save it, e-mail it or turn it into a follow-up post-card for the customer.
 
 
 
CRVIS’s web-based user interface allows any number of departments to access the information, limited only by your authorized user list and associated passwords.

 

The program has a variety of search features, including license plate, rental agreement #, date and time frame, exit or return lanes … it is virtually impossible not to find the image set – if the vehicle passed though one of your lanes.

The alert section allows you to set text and e-mail alerts based on certain plates passing through your lanes. Perhaps you are anxiously anticipating the return of a certain customer, good or bad.

You may also elect to do image audits right from the screen. A simple ‘before and after’ feature matches the rental images to the return images, so that you can easily determine the origin of the damage in question. Use an ipad in the lane, and you’ll be well informed by the time the customer exits the vehicle.