In the information age of today, success is coming to those who are giving power back to the people. Take any successful B2C internet company today, each and every company has empowered people is some or the other way. Dheeraj Batra was always an automobile enthusiast. Coming from a family that has business in automobile servicing, Dheeraj was always exposed o problems faced by car owners as well as those faced by the auto service industry. After researching the market for some time, Dheeraj has come up with a smart device called ZENE, that deploys the power of information to bring transparency to the car maintenance process. His Zene device helps you understand your cars better and helps you take better decisions when it comes to maintaining the health of your cars.
India’s car market has the potential to grow to 6+ Millions units annually by 2020.Global car majors have been ramping up investments in India to cater to growing domestic demand.(Data from MakeInIndia). The car market in India is surely expected to see some very good days in the times to come. And inspite of growing demand for car, maintaining the car’s health has always remained a challenge. A lot of times we don’t know what exactly is wrong with our car. We end up totally trusting what the mechanic tells us and he might or might not really be right always. A number of us have been in situations where we do a major repair in the car to solve a problem only to realize that the cause of the problem actually was something else.
Zene smart device provides you with information about the car vitals, driving information, location monitoring, theft alert, crash alerts, auto safety from hazards and one touch service booking and payments. The aim is the provide you with maximum transparency about everything related to you car. All this information is made available to you on your smartphone app.
Car Vitals: The Zene smart device plugs into your existing car port (of cars manufactured after 2008). Thereafter, the device gets information related to the car such as how is the car performing on vital parameters, does any part of the car need checking or repair etc from the various sensors present in the car and makes it available to you in an easily understandable format.
Driving Information : The pattern of driving largely influences the life and condition of the automobile. The Zene smart device makes information such as speeding, harsh breaking, too much acceleration, stopping too frequently etc available to you. This information is also made available on maps telling you exactly what location speeding happened or what locations harsh breaking happened allowing you to understand who was driving the vehicle at that point of time. The smartphone app also provides you with real time audible alerts such as ‘Too much harsh breaking going on’
Location Monitoring: The device also informs you if your car has moved out of a particular location zone. This is specially beneficial who have their kids picked up and dropped off by someone other than themselves.
Theft alert, crash alerts, auto safety from hazards: The Zene smart device provides you with information if your car has been broken into that is if someone has tried to open the car in an unusual way. The device also informs you if your car is met with an accident. The device also has features to inform emergency services in case of a crash. The device informs you in case of safety hazards for example leakage of CNG etc.
One touch service booking and payments : The company has also partnered with a few service centers in NCR region. The app now connects you with service centers with only a single tap on the screen. Once you put up a service request, your car is picked up and dropped off from your location. Payments can be done online. The app also provides you with information upfornt as to how much the servicing of the car is expected to cost. This provides additional transparency about what parts have a problem, will be dealt with and how much will be the cost thereby leaving no chances for the customer to feel cheating in the end.
On an average, Zene is expected to increase fuel efficiency by 12% to 15%, bring estimated 20% reduction in exhaust emission and bring 10% to 15% reduction in maintenance costs.
The company has launched it product on the 15th of August 2015 and seeing a very good response from the customers. The company is specifically targeting audiences who are driving enthusiasts and really care about the health of their car as well as people who are having multiple people drive their cars (Zene smart device helps people understand if the cars condition is really what the driver or mechanic claiming it to be). Zene competes with CarIQ from Pune who also works in the Smart Car Device segment.
Dheeraj Batra, Sanjeev Kumar and Vikas Dabas are the founders of Zene. Dheeraj comes from a family of auto service center owners and has always been a car enthusiasts. Due to his family business, Dheeraj was always exposed to problems of both car owners as well as service shop owners. Car owners always felt a lack of transparency in the car repair process. Service center owners on the other hand saw a huge churn of mechanics and therefore found it difficult to get good people who could accurately point out the problem. Dheeraj always though that the solution has to be there to this problem in the world of technology and that is how the idea of creating Zene smart device came into being. Sanjeev and Vikas both come from a telematics background and have developed such products before as well.
India produces about 25 lakh cars every year (numbers from Zene team) and the Zene team is looking to capture atleast 5 % to 7 % of this market in the next one year. The company is also looking to tie up with services stations in Chandigarh, Jaipur, Pune and Mumbai in times to come.The company is also looking for funding and is in early talks with some of the investors. The device is currently priced at 6000 INR and the company is given out a discount of 25% as an initial purchase offer right now.
