Carvaloo: Smart AI damage detection for fleet operators

When you are travelling, things can get hectic: booking a car-sharing vehicle for the trip to the main train station, hoping there’s no traffic jam on the way, and then searching for a parking spot at the station. Sometimes you might bump into something while parking. “In car sharing, people cause damage much more frequently than with private cars, according to our experience – but they rarely report it,” says Tom Althoff from damage analysis specialist carvaloo. “And the provider often has no way of finding out who is responsible for the damage.”

For fleet operators in car sharing, rental cars, or logistics, this means high costs, time-consuming manual inspections, and a lack of transparency. 

“Operators today lose 10 to 20 percent of their revenue due to vehicle damage that cannot be clearly assigned,” says Althoff. “Deductibles don’t help if the driver can’t be identified. The provider is left with the costs.”

carvaloo’s solution combines highly sensitive motion sensors – usually part of the installed telematics hardware in car-sharing and logistics vehicles – with artificial intelligence to detect damage in real time. “The problem isn’t registering a damage event – these sensors are already sensitive enough to detect even a key scratch,” says Althoff. “The difficulty is distinguishing between the various possible events. Our AI solution has been trained since 2017, using tens of thousands of event patterns and hundreds of millions of kilometers. Severe accidents can often be detected by the vehicle itself or the built-in telematics, but two-thirds of damages are caused by minor parking bumps. Our AI can precisely recognize normal operational events, like closing the passenger door or driving over a pothole, and reliably distinguish them from parking bumps – that’s our unique selling point.”

carvaloo adds a small software module to the telematics manufacturers’ sensor hardware. This algorithm filters relevant data, which is then transmitted via Telekom’s mobile network to the cloud. There, carvaloo’s Motion AI analyzes the vehicle’s movement data, detects patterns, and reliably distinguishes between normal driving maneuvers and damage-relevant events. If damage is registered, a notification is automatically sent to the provider.

Additionally, the driver is automatically prompted, for example via the car-sharing app, to take and upload a photo of the affected area. carvaloo’s Image AI then analyzes the photo to document and specify the damage. The result is a seamless, digital damage report containing a timestamp, location, and damage details – all automated, without manual checks.The next driver is automatically informed at the start of their trip that new damage has been detected.

The strength of the partnership between carvaloo and Telekom lies in Telekom’s global IoT infrastructure. Thanks to international network coverage, roaming agreements with over 600 mobile providers, and flexible IoT tariffs, carvaloo’s damage detection is available wherever fleets operate – from major European cities to remote regions in Asia or North America. For carvaloo, this international availability is the foundation for serving fleet customers worldwide and scaling the solution flexibly. “Our AI solutions place the highest demands on connectivity,” says Althoff. “With Telekom’s reliable IoT services, we have found the ideal partner to support our scaling while ensuring the robustness and speed our technology depends on.”

carvaloo’s AI solution has now become the global industry standard in car sharing. “Our AI works with passenger cars and small vans,” says Althoff. “As well as car sharing – where there are several hundred thousand vehicles worldwide – we’re currently focusing on logistics, specifically last-mile delivery, meaning delivery services for packages, food, or newspapers. Here we’re talking about several million vehicles. The potential is huge.” Thus, the international scalability of data transmission via Telekom’s mobile network becomes a decisive success factor. Around the globe, there are areas of application for the Internet of Things – and with T IoT, there is now a tariff that makes connectivity everywhere easier. One provider, one pricing, one international solution for connectivity.