Gadgetory

so it's an absolutely stunning day in Southern California but with all of the sunlight out it's probably gonna jack up the exposure on the camera that I'm using shoot on this but now over a year ago before I had joined the PocketNow team I started using the service called - it's this app that lives on your phone but communicates with Hardware connected to your car to try and train you to be a better driver sort of like a Fitbit for driving every time you get in your car it's tracking what's going on with your car and it's trying to keep track of how you operate your motor vehicle now when I started using it it was it was a really exciting experience because in all of the apps and phones and services that I've reviewed over the years it's exceedingly rare that an app or a service instantly becomes a part of my daily routine and so this is one of the few times that this has ever happened to me was with this dash app because the dash app fills some major glaring holes in mobility products in smart phones in and in how we use our cars so the dash app connects to your car how does it connect to your car well your car has a computer and there's a little port underneath the steering wheel you might have seen you know a mechanic use that port when they're checking your car's emission so what you can do is you buy a broadcasting unit and it plugs into that little car computer port so the dash app is free of course the developers would appreciate it if you would buy the computer plug-in through them I if you do it's more of like an Amazon affiliate kind of relationship but you know these are the same products you could buy anywhere else you're just kind of kicking the - developers a little extra cash for maintaining a really wonderful service so this thing plugs in and it starts broadcasting a signal your phone connects over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and you're all set up and running I the one I got is a super basic generic Bluetooth receiver class I think around 20 bucks when I bought it I really thought like oh well after I use this for a couple months I'll probably have to get something better this will probably burn out well your later this thing's still going strong so I've been really happy with that it's not a very complicated piece of machinery it's really silly I'm driving a car my car has Bluetooth it's connected to my phone too my stereo and the app that my automobile manufacturer supplies can do funny things like hook up to my Facebook account so guess what I absolutely never need to do when I'm driving a car check Facebook and as I'm often driving around for work it would be really nice if I had a system that could easily log my mileage for me for example and so - came about at a perfect time for me to be experimenting with automobile tech and it combined all of those things together in this one really pretty app interface now the whole conceit of the dash app is that it's supposed to turn you into a better driver you know it sends you these little alerts when you are hitting the accelerator harder than you probably need to if you come to a stop more aggressively than you need to then that means you were probably driving faster than you should have been what's funny is initially those things are very annoying while I started using dash for mostly the mileage tracking features every time you finish a trip it sends all of the information from that trip including your phone's GPS info up to a Google Doc spreadsheet which is super handy especially at the end of the year I mean cleaning claiming my mileage at the end of the year was really easy because I had it all nicely laid out my accountant thought it was beautiful for example all of the driving that I'm doing today just to shoot this video all tax deductible but those alerts really didn't start coming in handy and I started getting a better feel for my car I mean it's really funny those initial scores every trip that you take you get a score on how well you drove I always sort of took it for granted that well I live in Los Angeles so my scores are never gonna be that high those first couple weeks I think I was scoring in the 30s for fuel efficiency and driving aggressively and taking short trips and no one walks in Los Angeles so we drive everywhere it really did force me to take a step back and look at how I was driving and then I I would realize you know like hey if I come off the line just a little bit slower I can actually get up to speed faster by getting more sense in a more input from the transmission as to how I'm driving this car so unfortunately I can't really give you guys hard numbers on whether or not Dash's mission of saving money by being a better driver accurate honestly I'm proper terrible about keeping any kind of mileage logs even trying to go back to what I used to submit to my accountant before I was using - I don't have good information on really how much it costs to operate my car over those years but my scores in the batch app have climbed significantly over the last several months where I used to be tracking in the mid-30s I'm now in the low 70 and I'm now kind of running up into that wall where again I feel like well I mean I'm in LA that's about as good as I can do I think I might be able to get that into the low 80s which is a little bit more patience and a little bit more practice we've been talking about some really core features like mileage tracking and then also a vehicle tracking but every piece of information that comes off of your Kart computer is going to be accessible now to this - so say your check engine light turns on a - has the ability to read that engine diagnostic code and give you a readout on what's actually going wrong with your car and all kinds of other miscellaneous data can be sent to your phone for you to keep track of and happily this really wasn't much of a homework assignment I've been using the - app as a daily driver service since I installed on my phone over a year ago so we should wrap this up getting back to my initial question can the - app make you a better driver and I'm inclined to say yes just like any other fitness app can make you you know can make you healthier to help you lose weight same thing goes here if we can treat this type of behavior operating a motor vehicle and turn it into some kind of game where we get badges and scores and grades and ranks we can share that information with other people in our peer groups it makes it so much easier to stay honest so we'll leave a link down below this video where you can get more information on the - app what the developers are up to where you can download this app maybe run it on your own phone you drive around a lot I would recommend having some kind of solution for utilizing automotive information feedback on your phone this is one of the ones that I've gravitated towards I really like the app layout I really like the design I think it's easy to use and then it's got really great tie-in features like being able to dump information over to Google Docs which means anywhere I have a data connection I can get to really granular information on every single trip I take with my car as always folks thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more informational reviews like these and hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos fag now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next review - 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