Vehicle Session Infrastructure is the software layer that provisions a vehicle for a shared use case in one operation, then revokes everything when the use case ends. It sits between the car and the apps, fleets, and services that need temporary, governed access. The easiest way to picture it is by analogy to plumbing that already runs the internet:
- Stripe authorizes, captures, and refunds a payment.
- Auth0 creates, scopes, and revokes an identity session.
- DIMO creates a vehicle session, scopes the data, access, and spend inside it, and revokes it at return.
Put another way, it is OAuth for vehicles. Right now every fleet operator, rental app, and OEM wires up its own identity, keys, data, and payment integrations by hand. It is the same mess every website lived with before OAuth, when each site rolled its own login. DIMO is the shared primitive that replaces it.
The row, not the column
It is easy to mistake DIMO for a telematics provider or a digital-key vendor. It is neither. It does not compete on any single column; it composes the whole row. Here is the landscape:
| Layer | Who owns it | What it does, and lacks |
|---|---|---|
| Fleet telematics | Geotab, Samsara, Verizon Connect, Motive | Monitoring only; nothing to revoke when the use ends |
| Connected data API (read-only) | Smartcar, Motorq, High Mobility | A window into the car, with no session object |
| Digital key / access | CCC Digital Key, Standard Fleet | Access, but not composed with data, spend, and revocation |
| Session infrastructure | DIMO | One session that bundles and governs all of the above |
Or, in one line each: Smartcar is a window into the car; DIMO is the checkout desk. Samsara tells you what is happening; DIMO controls what is allowed to happen. Nobody else governs the session. That is the gap DIMO fills.
What one session bundles
A single DIMO session opens, and later revokes, a defined set of capabilities. The operator integrates once instead of stitching together five vendors:
- Identity: verify who is being granted access.
- Digital key: grant and revoke physical access, with no fob to lose.
- Data scope: normalized telemetry, limited to what the use case needs.
- Comfort and media: seat, mirror, and profile personalization, so a rental stops feeling like a stranger's car.
- Spend cap: charging, tolls, and fuel bounded at checkout (see per-session spend).
- Atomic revocation: when the session ends, all of it ends together and seals a verifiable record.
Why now
There are roughly 500 million vehicle sessions a year in the US: every rental, carshare trip, robotaxi ride, and fleet dispatch. Zero of them run on a shared protocol. At the same time, regulators are mandating exactly the properties a session provides: consented, scoped, revocable, auditable access (see connected vehicle data compliance). The demand and the rules are arriving together.
Who builds on it
Rental and carshare operators use it to run unmanned, mixed-fleet operations; OEM connected-services teams use it to meet the EU Data Act and offer post-session revenue; and developers build on the DIMO APIs and SDKs. One session primitive, many callers, including ones the industry has not met yet.