Car abuse rate: A car treatment history representation

Abstract

Trade of pre-owned context-dependent-pricey mechanical equipment involves lots of uncertainty, due to the complexity of the condition checking procedure of this category of equipment. We put forward the idea of continuous operation monitoring and simple reporting to make this trade experience as efficient and peaceful as possible. To validate the practicality of the idea, we choose pre-owned passenger vehicles as the target use-case. In the last several years, the market for secondhand car sales has grown a lot, due to its affordability and rising new car prices, thus, giving it a larger share of the overall car market’s value. The used car trade is usually a time-consuming, stressful, and fraud-prone process. In this paper, we propose a system, which is a novel concept rather than technology, to represent the treatment history of a car simply with two scores, denoting the mechanical and the body treatments, using the electronic control unit and other add-on sensors’ information. These scores are cyclically and wirelessly transmitted to and recorded in a data center to be fetched at a later time. The two treatment scores alongside the production year, the mileage, the vehicle history reports, and online marketplace valuations provide buyers with comfort and peace of mind in choosing a used car.