After I got my last car about 8 months ago, I’ve invested some money to make my car smarter like getting Apple car play installed. One of the things I did was to install a mini device to my car that makes my car a little bit smarter. The device name is Automatic.
This tiny gadget connects to the car’s diagnostic port which it receives it’s power and read and monitor car’s data like engine lights and stuff. The device contains GPS tracker and a sim card to continuously have low-speed connectivity like GPRS. This is more than enough to store it’s monitoring data in the cloud.
Here is the cool stuff you can do with having automatic on your car:
- Parking tracking – probable the best feature. I hate the idea of trying to remember where I parked in the street. This removes the need for that. Open the app and check where the car is 🙂
- Track when you started and finish driving. It’s like anti-theft alarm. You get a notification if someone starts the engine – sweet
- Track the whole tour you drove. It draws the driving path on the map and you can see your driving history like uber receipts.
- These driving records also contain avg speed, gas consumption…
- Driving style – how often you stop. how aggressive you accelerate…
- IFTTT integration – this opens the possibilities 100 times. You can set triggers like driving away from am geofence, or arriving at the geofence. This allows setting smart behaviors like Turn on garage lights when I arrive home.
It’s a little bit of a novelty features but if you are data nerd like me, it’s automatic tracking of your driving data which is enough value to me.
https://automatic.com
If your car is a VW then they have this tool where you can attach and collect exactly same informations. Moreover, they can give you better visibility of your car’s engine(not just the lights that you can see it from the console), oil consumption and gives you kind a driving score where you can compare with other drivers. I found it cool as well.
But there were so many concerns about the data security.
– How does the device complies with GDPR?
– Are they in the Europe market?
– Do you have such concerns that at some point of the data collection, could the insurance company conduct with your car data to determine your insurance rate?
These are big concerns to consider. I know that in the U.S. GDPR is just a pain in the boot however it is very useful for the companies that they can take advantage of it.
If your car is not a smart car, this tiny thing sounds very cool that bring you very good abilities.
In premium version, they can also pay your tolls that is cool.
Greetings!
Tev.
There are some concerns for sure. I’m not concerned about data collection as long as it’s not shared without “my consent” which is usually means death kiss on tech companies also here in the US even though they are not as restrictive or publicized as EU.