How it works

The Stolen Vehicle Locator component uses Bluetooth Low Energy beacons embedded in vehicles and your users' smartphones to form a collaborative detection mesh, enabling rapid localisation of any stolen vehicle.

The feature relies on a Bluetooth beacon emitting an iBeacon signal — the same hardware used by the Trip Analysis component for trip detection and vehicle identification. A single beacon serves both purposes.

Here's how it works:

• Vehicle identification: An iBeacon beacon is placed in each user's vehicle. It continuously broadcasts a unique identifier (UUID + Major + Minor) detectable by both Android and iOS smartphones.

• Theft reporting: You report the theft via the API by providing the iBeacon identifiers associated with the stolen vehicle.

• Collaborative search: Every smartphone in your user base that has opted in passively scans for iBeacon signals matching vehicles in the community fleet. Scanning runs in background, is energy-efficient, and requires no action from the user.

• Detection: When a smartphone detects a beacon matching a vehicle under search, it automatically transmits to the server: the smartphone's GPS location, the beacon signal strength (RSSI), and a timestamp.

• Vehicle location alerts: Each detection event — including position and timestamp — can be shared to your platform via a push service. A separate endpoint allows you to request a refined position calculated by cross-referencing detections from multiple users, with increasing accuracy as more detections are collected.