Renting a car without leaving the phone

The brief

Car rental has a paperwork problem. The booking is the easy part; what slows everyone down is the verification, the card, the agreement and the signature — the half hour at a counter that both sides would rather skip.

The brief was to move that half hour onto the phone without pretending the legal parts do not exist. The agreement still has to be read, signed and kept. It just does not have to be printed.

What it does

• The fleet, browsable and comparable. Cars with proper detail pages, a favourites list and a booking history, so a returning customer is not starting over.
• A card read by the camera. The payment card is scanned instead of typed, because nobody wants to enter sixteen digits on a phone in a car park.
• A signature on the screen. The rental agreement is signed with a finger, and the signature becomes part of the document rather than a box that claims consent.
• The contract, immediately. A copy of the signed agreement is produced on the spot and can be kept or shared right away, with no waiting for the office to send it.
• Answers without a phone call. An in-app assistant handles the questions every rental business answers all day, reachable from anywhere in the app.
• Albanian and English, plus a staff side. Both languages throughout, and the team can manage the fleet, the bookings and customer feedback from inside the app.

Built with

• Flutter

Where it stands

AutoCela is published on Google Play and in use. It is the project here that best answers what a mobile app can do that a website cannot: it uses the camera and the screen itself to remove a queue rather than to decorate one.

See also