A scooter tracking system in the Netherlands

Problem

The client, Scootpallet, is the largest rental company of electric mobility scooters in the Benelux region. Apart from city projects, they are also present in theme parks where visitors rent e-scooters to travel across the area.

Before, the client had to drive back and forth to the theme parks, look for their scooters and check the battery status to see if they had to charge it. This cost a lot of money, time, and effort. So the company decided to build a scooter tracking system.

The solution was expected to provide data and solve the following issues:

• inform about the number of scooters rented; 
• check the battery status of a mobility scooter and send notifications if it was time to recharge the battery;
• update the exact location to track an electric scooter in real time and at any given moment;
• send an alert if a scooter leaves a certain area;
• allow the client to remotely turn on/off the scooters and the lights;
• ensure access to shared fleet data 24/7 from any device and on the go;
• cope with a quickly growing number of scooters in the fleet.

Solution

Our partner, HubLogiQ, has developed a scooter tracking system that provides full control over mobility scooters renting. 

For its hardware part, the telematics service provider selected affordable and scalable equipment with device management, an in-built relay and an RFID reader:

• Teltonika FMB120; 
• Teltonika FMB920; 
• Dart3 Digital Matter devices.

Before the project, the scooter rental company had worked with the Digital Matter devices. HubLogiQ transferred the existing equipment to the new solution. 

The data from scooters is sent to the Wialon platform. Part of the platform’s diverse functionality is used in the scooter tracking project:

• Customer reports. They show daily battery status, a period within which a scooter is rented weekly, and so on. This way, the company always has up-to-date information about the amount of rented scooters. 
• Notifications. The client receives alerts set up for different scenarios: low battery, scooter getting in/out of a certain zone, what speed it’s going at (high speed can signify that a scooter is stolen).
• Geofences. The feature helps check the quantity of scooters in different locations: which mobility scooters are rented out at any given moment and which scooters are in the garage for maintenance.
• Icons indicating the status of a scooter. An icon reacts to ignition sensor values and changes its color: it turns red when the scooter is rented and green when it’s available.

The client can also turn the lights and a scooter itself on and off remotely to reduce battery usage when someone has left the scooter on by accident. The control system ensures a longer battery life and the client needs to charge e-scooters less frequently.

The scooter tracking system allows the rental company to massively increase the number of scooters in the fleet, because the cloud-based system copes with any number of connected electric scooters. Now they have 130 scooters connected to the Wialon-based solution; in the future, the company is planning to increase the amount up to 500 units. This way, the client can grow faster, add scooters and efficiently manage any number of them.

The client's fleet of tracked electric scooters

During the project implementation, HubLogiQ was in contact with the client via Whatsapp for fast replies to simple or urgent questions. For more important issues, they used the phone number or mail. HubLogiQ also provided training at the client’s location to show to their employees how to work with Wialon and the solution.