Your Idea, An API, A Car and 48 Hours …

For car2go, the Internet of Things is reality since we’ve started our service in 2008 in Ulm. Since that day, our initial fleet of 50 smarts increased to more than 14.000 vehicles, being used in more than 30 cities across 3 continents. Meanwhile we also extended the fleet by different vehicle models, like the Mercedes A, B, CLA and GLA Class.

On average, every second somewhere in the world a car2go member is starting a trip with one of our cars, which leads to more than 1.5 million rental transactions a month, between our vehicles and the car2go backend.

During the Hackathon Stuttgart YOU have the unique opportunity to use the technology that enables the car2go system to build your own MVP, based on our connected car platform.

In order to not focus too much on technical details of the current car2go system and also to allow everyone to use their own development hardware, we’ve simplified the access to the vehicles and the connected car platform compared to what you would find within car2go today.

Connected Car Platform – The Services

The setup we use for the the Hackathon Stuttgart basically looks like this:

car2go_ConnectedPlatform

There are mainly two services, the Vehicle Status Service (VSS) and the Event Stash Service (ESS), that are accessible over the internet through an easy to use REST APIs. Those APIs allow you to trigger vehicle functions and query the status of the vehicle (VSS), as well as receiving vehicle status updates using web hooks (ESS). The diagram below shows you the basic architecture of the platform.

The different vehicles can be addressed by their unique vehicle identification number.

Connected Car Platform – The APIs

By using the respective API you can access a couple of features of the car, which basically allow you to give someone access to the car and display messages on the telematics unit, which is placed behind the windshield:

  • Locking & unlocking the car
  • Engaging & disengaging the cars immobilizer
  • Show some custom text messages on the display of the telematics unit
  • Setting the status LEDs on the telematics unit

Beside those features that modify the state of the vehicle, you can also query various status values of the car or receive status changes using web hooks within your app:

  • status of the door lock (looked/unlocked)
  • status of the doors and the trunk (closed/open)
  • vehicle position (lat/long at every stopover, no realtime tracking)
  • NFC events of the included NFC reader
  • connection status of the vehicle (connected/disconnected)
  • fuel level (%)
  • mileage (km)
  • ignition status (on/off)
  • engine status (on/off)
  • battery level (volt)

Now it’s up to you …

So as a developer at the hackathon you have more or less all the features and capabilities that we are using in our car2go fleet as well. This time it’s just a lot easier, as you don’t have to deal with a lot of security topics which are of course very important in the real car2go fleet.

We will provide you even more detailed documentation during the three days of the hackathon on how to actually access the APIs, by providing you a detailed description of the APIs via Swagger and a basic „HelloCar“ Java project, which demonstrates the communication between the car and your own app / backend using the two services. Just clone it and get running. You will also have access to car2go developers at the site, giving you valuable background information in case you run into problems.

When it comes to the actual vehicles being used for the hackathon, we will provide you a selection of test vehicles, like Mercedes Benz smart, A, B, GLA or CLA-classes, which can be used by the teams … while supplies last of course 🙂

Now it is up to you to implement your ground breaking new idea based on our platform …