Biofi CarTron

Keeping Your Car Germ Free

Biofi is an Indian startup specializing in UV based disinfection devices for hospitals, commercial spaces and consumers. Biofi’s products disinfect a wide variety of environments ranging from entire rooms to cars and even individual objects such as veggies and cutlery. Their vertical integration from design to manufacturing helped them raise investments from stellar names in the Indian angel and VC community.

The demand for these devices peaked during the Covid pandemic as governments (central and state) struggled to cope with the surge in cases during the second wave.

The global UV disinfection equipment market was valued at approximately USD 4.12 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.23% from 2024 to 2030

Biofi came to us with a brief to design their entire range of products with the goal of making them the preferred choice across commercial and consumer markets. Of these, Car Tron was their first foray into the automobile after sales segment.

Project Insights

CarTron was Biofi’s first foray into the after-sales automobile market. And one with players like Honeywell already entrenched. To ensure sales, we would have to create a

1. Design on par with products in the western markets

2. Ensure it could be developed rapidly to ride the public interest in clean air in their cars

3. Be manufacturable in Biofi’s in-house facilities and their ecosystem

Make it Look World Class

We found leading global players in this space to benchmark our designs and carried out a design audit of their products. After presenting our findings, we built a brand guidelines document with the key pillars of neat and clean, easy to use, precise and reliable. This document helped guide our concept development and selection process for this and the entire range of Biofi’s products.

User Empathy

An average commuter spends about 2.5 hours per day or 10% of their life in their car. And most forget to open the window for a short time to refresh the air inside after parking the car overnight. We needed a device that could be placed in the most memorable location in the car so that the user would remember to switch it on moment they entered the car. And Indian cars as well. We took photos of as many car interiors as we could and measured the size of various cup holders and cubby spaces over the tunnel that came with each model. This helped us create a size and a form factor that would allow it to fit in most cars on the Indian road.

Materials Matter

UV-C radiation degrades plastics by breaking down the chemical bonds degrading surface quality and eventually compromising structural integrity. However, a car accessory needed to look the part and there was no way we could avoid plastics. We worked with polymer makers and Biofi’s scientists to identify suitable polymers that would help the product look the part and survive the UV_C radiation used to clean the air.

Airflow Matters

A Car Air cleaner works by sucking in the ambient air at one end, filtering in the middle and pushing out clean air at the other. The entire product is designed to present as few obstacles to the air flow as possible to give maximum throughput. This is essential to clean the air in the car as quickly as possible and keep its working as silent as possible.

Service Easily

The first stage of the CarTron consists of a prefilter whose job is to stop particulate matter from moving forward. India being a dusty country, this filter gets clogged much earlier than its counterparts in the west. We designed the CarTron to allow the users to access and replace this filter with the least number of steps possible.

Roll with the Changes

We designed the CarTron at the height of the pandemic. And while we had significant experience of working remotely with overseas clients, we were faced with the unique situation of having our entire team work out of different locations, rarely meeting in person. Our team took up this challenge working over the internet to deliver the design on time to our client.

Key Tasks Accomplished

1. Concept Development
2. Enclosure Design
3. Prototype Design
4. Materials Selection
5. Design for Manufacturing

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