Drive Academy Co., Ltd. — new platform launch story

ℹ︎For confidentiality, company names, project names and system images have been replaced with pseudonyms and mock-ups.

Lesson records and fleet operations alike — Built in-house from scratch to in-vehicle IoT.

DriveLog is a driving-instruction platform that automates everything from fetching a training car's schedule to recording video and audio of the drive, all managed centrally in the cloud. Data underpins the quality of teaching.

Automatic recording, reviewing instruction, fleet operations and vehicle-device management — an IoT foundation meeting all four axes driving instruction needs, built in-house from scratch in 8 months. This is the story of that launch.

Read the build story Try the demo View overview

Recording

In-vehicle IoTAutomatic

Drives recorded

Review

Audio→ text

What was taught made visible

Management

UnifiedManagement

School, instructor, vehicle

Robustness

Offline support

Syncs when the connection returns

admin.drivelog.example.jp

Vehicle

Online

Today's lessons

Car 1

Car 2

Car 3

CLIENT

About the client

Drive Academy Co., Ltd., one of the country's leading names in local road safety.

Drive Academy Co., Ltd. runs driving instruction. With many training cars and instructors, it needed safe, high-quality teaching supported by efficient operations.

Records of each lesson, meanwhile, depended on handwriting and memory, which made reviewing them and standardising quality difficult. They chose to build in-house, from scratch, a foundation that automates recording through in-vehicle IoT and supports both instruction and operations with data.

Recording

Automatic

Integration

In-vehicle IoT

Management

Cloud

Business flow — in-vehicle IoT → recording → cloud → assessment

STEP

The in-vehicle device starts up

Schedules fetched by device code

STEP

Record the drive

Recording + speech-to-text

STEP

Syncs to the cloud

Collected and stored in AWS S3

STEP

Review & assessment

Teaching improved from the admin console

CHALLENGE

The design problems to solve

Four structural requirements behind teaching quality and operating efficiency.

None of these were questions of technology choice; they were business requirements tied directly to teaching quality, safety and operating efficiency. Building from scratch, the design had to satisfy all of them at once.

Nothing is left on record

Unless recording is automated, Teaching depends on the individual, and quality cannot be standardised.

there is nothing to review

Unless video and audio are put to use, Improving and sharing instruction.

Schedules fail to get through

Unless dispatch and schedules arrive as data, Miscommunication and confusion happens.

Information scatters

Unless school, instructor and vehicle are joined up, Operations made visible is not possible.

ARCHITECTURE

The architecture we built together

Driving instruction, on a foundation held up by data, across four areas.

Automatic recording, reviewing instruction, fleet operations and vehicle-device management — the four areas driving instruction needs, built in-house from scratch together with Drive Academy Co., Ltd. In-vehicle IoT and a cloud API connect the field to the data.

EXECUTION

8 months

Duration

24 man-months

Total effort

Area ①

Automatic recording

Challenge

Lesson records must be kept automatically.

Solution

Drives recorded by in-vehicle IoT

Records even offline, syncs later.

Area ②

Reviewing a lesson

Challenge

What was taught must be reviewable and shareable.

Solution

Speech-to-text + assessment scores

Checked in sync with the footage.

Area ③

Fleet operations

Challenge

Schedules must reach the vehicle reliably.

Solution

Schedules pushed to devices automatically

What is happening is visible in real time.

Area ④

Vehicle-device management

Challenge

Vehicles and devices must be managed in one place.

Solution

Device settings and status managed remotely

Online status and battery level are known.

BACKEND

Laravel

PHP 8

MySQL SSanctum / Swagger

IoT & CLOUD

DIn-vehicle device (device code)

AWS S3 TSpeech-to-Text

DELIVERY

AREST API CAdmin console

IMPACT

The value the platform creates

Teaching quality at Drive Academy Co., Ltd., accelerated.

This foundation continuously produces business outcomes — teaching quality, safety and operating efficiency — rather than technical metrics.

A foundation where records keep themselves

Drives and lessons are recorded automatically, so nothing depends on one person.

Lessons can be reviewed

Video and speech-to-text raise the quality of each lesson.

A design that makes operations visible

Schedules, results and device status are all seen in one place.

Focus stays on the field

Less manual recording, so instructors can focus on teaching.

🧑‍🏫

STAKEHOLDER

Instructors

Typically

Records are handwritten, which makes review hard.

At Drive Academy,

Video and speech-to-text let a lesson be reviewed.

Teaching quality rises

Standardisation moves forward too

🚗

STAKEHOLDER

Learners

Typically

Feedback is mostly spoken, so nothing remains.

At Drive Academy,

Learners get concrete guidance grounded in the record.

Learning outcomes improve

Safe driving takes hold

🗂️

STAKEHOLDER

Operations administrators

Typically

Dispatch and scheduling tend to stay analogue.

At Drive Academy,

Schedules, results and device status managed on one screen.

Operating efficiency rises

Fewer miscommunications

📊

STAKEHOLDER

Management

Typically

Teaching quality and operations are hard to see in numbers.

At Drive Academy,

Recorded data makes quality and efficiency visible.

Safety and trust rise

Management that starts from data

Lesson records and fleet operations alike — Built in-house from scratch to in-vehicle IoT.

Drive Academy Co., Ltd., one of the country's leading names in local road safety.

Four structural requirements behind teaching quality and operating efficiency.

Driving instruction, on a foundation held up by data, across four areas.

Teaching quality at Drive Academy Co., Ltd., accelerated.

Experience DriveLog through a working demo.