BMW Pilots 'Gamified' Crypto Reward System To Incentivize Drivers To Track Mileage

BMW has completed a pilot together with crypto startup DOVU, an official blog post from DOVU outlined today, May 8. The pilot introduces a tokenized rewards system using DOVU’s ERC-20 token, DOV, that encourages drivers to track mileage on their leased vehicles.

In their blog post, DOVU points out that preserving the residual market values of leased vehicles is “literally where [BMW] makes its money,” and isolates car mileage as the single most important factor that determines whether the resale value of the vehicle in question will be negatively affected.

Yet existing systems to manage mileage data are inadequate, as DOVU emphasizes:

“Currently the system to track vehicle mileage across fleets inside BMW is via a fuel card. When a driver fuels their vehicle, the fuel station is supposed to enter and store the mileage of the vehicle, also printing the mileage on the fuel receipt. For a number of reasons including mistyped numbers, oversight or even just being too busy, this data is at best inconsistent but often useless.”

The pilot tested a tokenized rewards system, whereby mileage data collection will still be manually input by drivers, but a DOVU token wallet app will be used as an incentive for drivers to take a snapshot of their dashboard at a specific time each week.

According to DOVU’s blog post, optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning would then identify the numerics and convert them to an integer which can be verified and stored on the blockchain. A smart contract would reward drivers with 1 DOV token for each submission.

Porsche came out in February of this year as “the first” car manufacturer to test blockchain systems for use by drivers, as well as for driverless cars. In March, Cointelegraph reported on a blockchain-related patent filing by Ford, which similarly seeks to influence customer behavior by using the exchange of crypto tokens to facilitate traffic flow between cars.