We’re often asked about the future of our platform given the rapid transformation of the automotive sector. With so many automakers racing toward widespread electrification and vehicle connectivity, how will Smartcar step up? We’re excited to announce brand-specific endpoints, more compatible vehicles, and a smoother user experience.
We believe an ecosystem of cars and software will not work unless businesses have the means to build with less friction and more creativity. Our goal of helping app developers simplify integrations with vehicles is more important than ever.
We announced how we’re taking this goal one step further at our Winter 2022 Product Showcase. We’ve incorporated popular customer feedback into new features that will help businesses drive growth in two important ways:
✅ Faster product delivery with consistent APIs for your technical team
✅ Simpler onboarding with a secure and intuitive vehicle owner experience
If you didn’t get a chance to attend the showcase, you can check out the recording here. But keep reading for a rundown of what’s new with Smartcar.
What we’ll be doing with our 24M Series B funding
Our latest round of funding is something that all our customers should be excited about. We’re building a more robust platform to support the needs of new innovative uses cases across automotive verticals. This means doubling down on our commitment to:
- Extend our platform’s capabilities with new vehicle telemetry APIs and compatibility with more car brands.
- Scale our operations to support expansion to the European market while growing what we’re doing in the U.S.
We’re hiring across all teams to make this possible! If you or anyone you know is interested in creating exciting new opportunities in mobility, check our careers page.
Do more with our API: More compatibility and brand-specific endpoints
New year, new compatible vehicles, and new opportunities for your mobility business!
In the United States, Smartcar is now compatible with all Acura models that support the AcuraLink app and all Mercedez Benz models that support the Mercedes me connect app. This brings our compatibility to 23 brands across the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Check out all our compatible vehicles to see Smartcar’s API capabilities by make and model.
But beyond introducing new compatibilities, we’ve been working on a way to provide customers with more granular functionalities for existing brands.
We're excited to announce the release of brand-specific endpoints! 🚗
Why we launched brand-specific endpoints
To keep to our goal of making vehicle integrations simple and streamlined, each endpoint we build is supported by a majority of our compatible brands for standardization and consistency.
However, Smartcar’s growth over the past year showed us the importance of giving developers access to granular data that brings the most value to their audience, even if that data is unique to one or a few brands.
So our new requirement for building endpoints is: If the data is available, developers should be able to access it.
As opposed to releasing a new endpoint for every brand’s unique capability, brand-specific endpoints give developers get the benefit of:
- Integrating with vehicles of a particular brand without the confusion of determining compatibility
- Working with our Standard API, which is integrated with all the other API capabilities Smartcar offers
- Accessing more data while maintaining standardized error codes, permissions, and simple compatibility checks
How to get started
Brand-specific endpoints are now available for Cadillac, Chevrolet, and Tesla!
An API request made by brand-specific endpoints isn’t much different from those made with our standard API endpoints. The primary difference here is the brand name in the URL.
You can find a full list of available endpoints in our API reference.
A smoother integration: Centralized API data and faster vehicle logins
We believe that a good integration between apps and vehicles is driven by three components: 1) centralized data, 2) timely support, and 3) easy onboarding. We’re making it easier for businesses to experience this with Dashboard Insights and our improved Smartcar Connect flow.
Dashboard Insights
Late last year, we announced the release of our redesigned dashboard to house all Smartcar integration data with more clarity.
Easily navigate through Smartcar integration data and break down active vehicle reports by month, make, and status codes. Here’s our Director of Experience, Angie Shields, taking our audience through a live demo of our new dashboard.
To learn more, check out our deep dive into what you can do with our developer dashboard.
An updated Smartcar Connect flow
The latest version of Smartcar Connect makes it faster than ever for vehicle owners to connect their car to an app of their choice. By remembering a vehicle owner’s login state, it’s easy to connect your car to new applications without having to re-enter your login credentials for your connected services account each time.
Here's what that would look like:
- Logging into your connected services account to onboard the first vehicle in the fleet
2. Onboarding subsequent vehicles of the same brand
Subscribe to our newsletter for more updates
We’ll keep you posted with a monthly recap on our latest product updates, events, and the exciting things developers are building with our API. Drop your email into our chatbot and you're all good to go!
New to Smartcar? Schedule a demo today to learn how our car APIs can help your mobility app or service.
