With IOTA to the future of the used car trade?

One of the biggest problems of private car selling and buying is trust. Can I trust the seller of the vehicle that the car has been treated and maintained appropriately during its use, that necessary work has been carried out by professional staff and that the car is really accident-free. Another very important aspect is whether the mileage corresponds to the kilometres really driven or whether it has been manipulated. By cheating with the kilometres driven on a car, several million euros are spent every year on vehicles above the actually valid price than they are worth at the time. The damage to buyers is enormous. Business is booming, via classified ads, the darknet or simply through acquaintances, it is easy to get someone to turn back the digital or analogue mileage in the vehicle and thus make the car worth a few thousand euros in a few simple steps.

“Unbelievable, but true: according to police figures, the mileage of around two million vehicles is manipulated every year in Germany in order to increase the sales value or to avoid leasing penalties for exceeding the agreed mileage. This means that the speedometer on every third used car sold in Germany has been manipulated.

By falsifying the mileage, an average of 3000 euros higher sales price is achieved per vehicle. Extrapolated, this results in damage of over six billion euros every year. The victims are primarily private buyers of used cars.”

From: https://www.tuev-nord.de/de/privatkunden/ratgeber-und-tipps/auto-ratgeber/tachobetrug

Every commercially produced car in the world has a chassis number with which it can be uniquely identified. The future will be that this unique identifier of the vehicle will be digitised and accordingly available for all people to check. This is where IOTA comes into play. In the future, this data can be stored unchangeably in the Tangle. For this amount of data, a technology is needed that does not require transaction costs, is green and can ensure data integrity. Currently, IOTA is working together with Dell on Project Alvarium, which will make this data integrity possible. Only 100% secure data integrity can ensure that trust can be built between individual actors.

In the future, it could work as follows: When taking delivery of the vehicle, the vehicle buyer is given access to a personally managed wallet in which the vehicle’s data is stored. This access expires after the legal handover to the subsequent owner and passes to the latter. The wallet is, so to speak, the digital identity of the vehicle. By means of a generated QR code, data can now be written into the Wallet. These QR codes could be implemented as one-time codes, so that misuse can be ruled out by using them only once. If the car is now taken to a workshop for an inspection, the following data can be recorded

- Has an inspection taken place?

- Who carried out the inspection and whether it was carried out by an authorised workshop?

- What is the mileage of the vehicle at the time of the inspection?

- What work was carried out on the vehicle?

- What is the condition of certain components?

- Which parts of the vehicle should be observed?

- Was the oil changed and what oil was used?

and written to the customer’s wallet by the workshop operator. Here fraud can still take place in which the vehicle owner bribes the workshop manager and demands that he should write false data on the Wallet. This could be managed and verified, for example, by an independent organisation that certifies the ability to write to the digital vehicle checkbook using a QR code and blocks untrustworthy actors from accessing the system. The risk of being locked out of the system drastically reduces the proportion of malicious actors, as one-off gains are not proportionate to the potential future of the business. With the help of the IOTA tangle, it is ensured that deposited data is secured in a way that cannot be manipulated.

The current vehicle owner is given the opportunity to determine which of the stored data can be shared individually as needed. If a vehicle is sold or another inspection takes place in another workshop, the vehicle owner can generate a one-time QR code that can be read by the potential buyer or mechatronics engineer and checked whether everything is in order with the vehicle as described and the data corresponds to the expected values. In addition, the mechatronics technician can see at a glance which components have been installed and can adjust the upcoming work accordingly. For the sale of the vehicle, this procedure can be simplified to such an extent that a non-manipulable digital certificate is issued for the car, which is stored directly in the vehicle description. This way, the future buyer of the vehicle can be sure that this vehicle is in the expected condition. This system creates trust in both directions.

In addition, the wallet’s data can be shared anonymously or non-anonymously with organisations, car manufacturers or one’s own insurance company, and by providing the data, one generates cryptocoins that are transferred to one’s own wallet. IOTA not only ensures trust between many different actors, it also ensures that the data will belong to the user in the future.