Building a connected vehicle platform for Hero MotoCorp using AWS IoT

Operating out of India, HMCL has over 11,000 global customer touchpoints and an annual production capacity of 9.5 million motorbikes. To stay ahead of changing industry standards, HMCL needed a CVP that delivered remote diagnostics, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and comprehensive customer features. Its prior vendor-proprietary platform didn’t provide relevant data for analytics, limited data access and control, and couldn’t support advancements in features like geofencing, live tracking, and theft alerts.

HMCL decided that the path to meeting its advanced requirements would be integrating eSync OTA from Excelfore with AWS IoT capabilities. Using this solution, the company could assemble a configurable, scalable CVP for domestic and international markets. “The older platform had issues with stability and scalability as well as other limitations,” says Parikshit Tyagi, lead platform owner at HMCL. “So, we looked to create something configurable and scalable with a platform-first approach.”

By combining Excelfore’s connected-vehicle embedded software and AWS managed cloud services, HMCL was able to deploy the new CVP in under a year—regaining feature agility, data ownership, and cost control.

HMCL founded its solution on three core pillars. The first pillar was the cloud-based data platform, which was built using AWS IoT. This helps HMCL to securely ingest and process data at scale for internal analytics. Although AWS IoT is designed for larger vehicles, HMCL customized it to suit the lighter hardware and connectivity of two-wheelers, facilitating reliable data capture even if a wireless link is not available.

The second pillar of the solution is the OTA capability provided by the Excelfore eSync OTA platform, which was ported to the HMCL telematics unit and in-vehicle architecture by the AWS Partner. In the cloud, the eSync server software uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a service that helps users build, run, and scale production-ready Kubernetes applications easily across any environment. With the Excelfore eSync client and agents embedded in the motorbike, the OTA process can reach every engine control unit for quick and efficient software updates with complete automatic logging of results. HMCL controls the update process, scales resources up and down quickly for large campaigns, and provides reliable updating while maintaining control and visibility on costs. This approach has saved money while significantly reducing the manual effort used for each update.

As a third pillar of the solution, HMCL also developed mobile software development kits for Bluetooth Low Energy and wireless internet connectivity to power its customer app—providing features like trip data, alerts, and remote commands through secure APIs. The platform uses service-oriented vehicle diagnostics to provide diagnostic services remotely, helping HMCL read vehicle fault data without physically connecting to or opening the motorbike. For poor connectivity, the HMCL team engineered a custom Bluetooth Low Energy protocol that makes it possible for the software development kit to store data locally. This way, it can sync to the cloud once connectivity improves while still facilitating direct vehicle control through the app.

Throughout this development process, HMCL worked closely with Excelfore engineers and AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that can help companies realize their desired business outcomes when using the AWS Cloud. With a collaborative approach to deliver connected mobility at a global scale, the three teams codesigned solutions, tackled challenges, and learned from each other to build a shared expertise. “The AWS, Excelfore, and HMCL teams engaged in a joint effort where we shared a single aspiration: to build one of the industry’s most advanced CVPs,” says Tyagi.

Since launching its CVP, HMCL has delivered more than 36 customer features to enhance convenience, connectivity, safety, and security, such as Bluetooth Low Energy music control, live tracking, remote geofencing, accident notifications, and theft alerts. The time that it takes to roll out new features has been reduced from 3 months to 1, a 67 percent acceleration. Additionally, HMCL is now able to achieve a greater than 99 percent success rate for its OTA campaigns.

“Our OTA success rates are now among the highest in the industry,” says Ram Kuppuswamy, chief operating officer for manufacturing at HMCL.

Concerning operational reliability, HMCL’s platform offers greater than 99.6 percent availability. With an error rate below 0.4 percent, the platform handles about 32 Mbps of data ingestion on average from approximately 40,000 vehicles, with more than 2.2 million API requests per day. The new platform delivers alerts in under 3 seconds compared to 5­–10 seconds on the old platform and maintains API latency at the 95th percentile below 200 milliseconds—a significant improvement from over 500 milliseconds previously. Plus, the OTA updates save 3–4 months of manual effort and thousands of dollars per electronic control unit upgrade.

Beyond delivering customer features, HMCL’s internal teams now use connected data for remote diagnostics, research and development, and business decision-making, laying the groundwork for more data-driven capabilities.

Overall, HMCL sees this project as helping the company transform into an industry leader and data-driven original equipment manufacturer. And the company is expanding the solution to advanced use cases, such as predictive maintenance driven by AI and machine learning, digital twins for vehicle design, and future vehicle-to-everything capabilities. “This was the first project at this scale at HMCL, built to our advanced requirements,” says Alay Mehta, head of CVP at HMCL. “Now, we can quickly scale up as industry leaders.”