A look at how the world's largest two-wheeler manufacturer replaced a legacy vendor system with a scalable, data-driven connected vehicle platform — and what it means for the future of mobility.
When you produce 9.5 million motorbikes a year and serve customers across more than 11,000 global touchpoints, your technology has to keep up. For Hero MotoCorp (HMCL), one of the world's largest two-wheeler manufacturers by volume, that meant confronting a hard truth: their existing connected vehicle platform was holding them back.
The old system was vendor-proprietary, limiting HMCL's visibility into its own data, constraining feature development, and unable to support the kind of advanced capabilities — live tracking, geofencing, theft alerts, over-the-air (OTA) software updates — that modern riders increasingly expect. So HMCL made the decision to build something better. From the ground up.
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Partnering with AWS and Excelfore (an AWS Automotive Competency Partner), HMCL designed a new Connected Vehicle Platform (CVP) built on three core pillars:
1. Cloud-Based Data Infrastructure via AWS IoT The foundation of the platform is a secure, scalable data pipeline built on AWS IoT. HMCL customized it to suit the specific constraints of two-wheelers — lighter hardware, intermittent connectivity — ensuring reliable data capture even when a wireless link isn't available.
2. Over-the-Air (OTA) Updates via Excelfore eSync Rather than dispatching technicians or requiring riders to visit a service center, HMCL can now push software updates directly to every electronic control unit across its fleet. The eSync OTA platform runs on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), giving HMCL the ability to scale campaigns up or down quickly while maintaining full visibility and control over costs. Every update is automatically logged.
3. A Connected Rider App Powered by Custom SDKs HMCL developed mobile software development kits for both Bluetooth Low Energy and wireless internet connectivity to power their customer-facing app. Riders get access to trip data, real-time alerts, and remote commands — all through secure APIs. For areas with poor connectivity, HMCL engineered a custom Bluetooth Low Energy protocol that stores data locally and syncs to the cloud once a connection is restored.
The entire platform was deployed in under a year — a remarkable pace for a project of this complexity and scale.
The numbers tell a compelling story:
Ram Kuppuswamy, Chief Operating Officer for Manufacturing at HMCL, put it simply: "Our OTA success rates are now among the highest in the industry."
Perhaps the most significant shift isn't in any single metric — it's in how HMCL now operates as a business. Internal teams use connected vehicle data for remote diagnostics, research and development, and strategic decision-making. The platform has laid the groundwork for predictive maintenance powered by AI and machine learning, digital twin capabilities for vehicle design, and future vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity.
Alay Mehta, Head of CVP at HMCL, captured what this project represents: "This was the first project at this scale at HMCL, built to our advanced requirements. Now, we can quickly scale up as industry leaders."
Hero MotoCorp's journey is a case study in what becomes possible when a manufacturer takes full ownership of its data, its platform, and its product roadmap. By moving away from a black-box vendor system and toward a configurable, cloud-native architecture, HMCL hasn't just improved its metrics — it has repositioned itself as a technology-led company.
For any manufacturer still relying on legacy, vendor-locked systems, the message is clear: the cost of inaction is measured not just in technical debt, but in competitive ground lost.
Read the full case study on the AWS website: Hero MotoCorp Connected Vehicle Platform Case Study