aCar - Track your vehicles

[Zelig]

Great app. Just donated. Hope the developer comes back.

I have created different Fuel Specs for different brands of Unleaded RON95 and RON98 because here in Australia the formulation/additives is apparently different for each brand. Some people swear they get better performance and fuel economy on one brand compared to another. I wanted to use aCar to help me test that theory.

However, on various charts (eg Avg L/100 Cmp), whilst it tracks each Fuel Spec separately as I wanted, the LABELS on the charts only say "95 Octane", "98 Octane" etc so I get multiples of each and I can't tell which is Shell and which is Caltex.

I want the Labels on the charts to be based on the GRADE field of the Fuel Spec, not the Octane rating.

 

[Armond]

Okay! I'm back here... First let me thank the users who have helped me to support this thread even in my absence.

Second, I would like to stress on the healthiness of aCar application and project. It's still in my complete focus and I've been doing active support and development (you can see it from the updates).

Currently I'm working with some translators to come up with good quality translations for aCar to cover a part of the community requests: Localization!
I will release them as soon as they get ready! So stay tuned

Now back to answering your posts here...

 

[Armond]

I would really like to see a graph of mpg for different brands of gas - is this feature already there and I missed it?

This is already in my feature request list. I will try to consider it in a future update if I receive enough votes for.

 

[Armond]

I've got an issue. Probably a stupid question. Do you have to manually back up your data, or does it create a backup on a schedule? I've had to factory restore my Captivate, and I am so upset - I've lost all my data. I do backups with Titanium Backup, but it seems to have not backed up the data. I'm hoping it's lurking somewhere, but I have no idea where to find it. Most likely you'll tell me it's gone, but I'm hoping....

aCar has both manual and automated backups.
For Free Users: A monthly automated is scheduled, so at the worse case one will lose one month worth of his data.
For Pro Users: The automated backup frequency is set to "daily" (default) but you can change it to "weekly", "hourly", "every 6/12 hours" or even leave it on "monthly". Pro users can also take manual backup whenever they want.

If a backup application (e.g. Titanium) wants to successfully backup aCar, it should backup the database as well (located on phone internal memory). But I don't support Titanium of other backup apps because aCar has got its own backup mechanism.

ETA Interesting. I opened the app from my app drawer this morning (I'd opened it twice via my folder organizer shortcut I've got set up for all things 'car' on my 'car' screen) and received a message that it seemed I'd reset my phone and had lost my data, would I like to restore? Of course I would! So it is all back now, thank goodness! I wonder why that message didn't display the first two times I opened aCar?

I have no blind guess here. I should have your phone logs to see what the problem has been.
But the problem is that Android phones tend to keep the very recent logs only. So if such a problem happens in the future (you open aCar for the first time but you don't get any restore opportunity - while you have your backup files in aCar expected directory on your SD-Card), you should immediately send me your logs for further analysis.

And I usually suggest "SendLog" application to collect and email your logs.

 

[Armond]

I'd like to ask why you base the fill up records on the number of gallons and the price per gallon, then the price is calculated. I'm used to entering the total fill up price, and then the number of gallons - the price per is the calculated number. It's easier to remember those two numbers if you're 'on the fly'.

I'm not sure what stops you from doing so. Enter the "Volume (gallons)" and then the "Total Cost". Obviously the price/gal is automatically calculated. Let me know if it doesn't work for you.

 

[Armond]

I just purchased the pro version and am having a problem importing my fuelly data.

If I look at the CSV file that I imported, some of the data is not correct. For example, in the CSV file one entry says I went 268 miles on 13.34 gallons for a 20.09 MPG. But that same entry in aCar says it equals 23 MPG with the same data.

There is a slight difference between aCar and Fully.com: The way MPG is calculated. aCar calculates the MPG and assigns it to the previous record because it's the exact fuel which has been consumed. But there are many other softwares and applications (including Fuelly.com) which assign the MPG to the latest record.

I imported 63 entries and most seem to be correct, but there are some that seem to show incorrect MPG.

If I look at the statistics of what I imported, I have a Max MPG of 206.553. When in the CSV file it is only 36.6. The Min MPG is correct

Any ideas?

An incorrect mileage, volume or forgetting to mark a fillup as missed or partial where it should, can lead into such problem. Sometimes the CSV file isn't exported correctly (e.g. the data of missed/partial columns are not exported) or even a bug in aCar can lead into such problem.

But it's always recommended to upgrade to the latest version in the case of such problems.

After all, if you're still reading this thread (so sorry for my very late reply!), and you're still having this problem, please take a backup of your data and send it to me so that I can analyze the problem. Also please send me the CSV file you've initially imported from.

 

[Armond]

Thanks for a great app; and a couple of requests.

I saw requests for online data sync, and auto fill location from GPS.. those would be great!

Sorry if these are duplicates, but a couple of things I've noticed:

On the Add new entry screens, it would be great if it could show the last gas fill odometer at the top.. kind of a sanity check during data entry. I tend to fill out most fields while the car is filling, which means my ignition is off and I can't see the ODO anymore.. I'd be able to tell if I was transposing the numbers as I entered them if I could see what the last gas fill was..

While I would also like to show every bit of information, sometimes the lack of space of mobile devices makes you to limit the stuffs. I've tried a lot to put the most frequently used fields at the top of the screen with no need to scroll. If I want to show the last Odo or even MPG, the lower fields including the "Partial Fill-Ups" and "Missed Fill-Ups" markers will drop out of the screen and some scrolling will be needed.

Don't get me wrong me please, I completely agree that showing such information will help the users to make less mistakes but I should find a way to implement them efficiently without breaking the usability of the app.

I just put your requests in my feature request list for not to miss them.

If you're in the "brows recs" screen, if you zoom in to a record, it would be great if you could either swipe left/right to do previous/next, or even just have a prev/next button.. I spent about 10 minutes yesterday trying to find a record that the graphs showed had been accidentally entered with the wrong octane.. next/prev would have made it easy... (no doubt there was probably an easier way..)


Thanks for listening!

Since there isn't any further space for left/right buttons or icons, I prefer the swipe method. I will try to implement this in a future update. Just added one further vote for this feature.

 

[Armond]

Thankyou for the reply, saw it only now..

Personal vehicle manager cannot export directly to .csv, but can export as .xls. If I open the exported file in Excel and then save as .csv, will it work ? I have now bought a Dell Streak, and would very much like to buy this, but this will only be useful if I can import my data. Right now I input all my gas data into the desktop counterpart of Personal Vehicle Manager.

Yes, Excel can export and save an XLS file as CSV.

And also some sort of sync with either desktop app (preferable) or a web application is required.

Please clarify.

They're both in my long term plan. But they need lots of efforts and time. They're not a small feature at all and that's why I've put them in my long term plan.

 

[Armond]

When I look at my statistics, there is an item called #miles/day. This item use to be fairly accurate. Currently this item is showing my #miles/day as 1.52. This makes no sense since I drive 32 miles to work, 5 days a week. That is at the very least (64*5)/7= 45.7 miles/day. And that is only if I do not drive a single mile during the weekend.

How is this stat calculated? Why am I suddenly getting this very low number of 1.52 instead of a value closer to 40? Just curious on what I did (or was done to the program) to cause this value to change so radically.

Thanks again for a great program!

"miles/day" is calculated by "Total Miles / Total Days" formula. And it means that it's a value for your entire data (from day one). If you need to have your "recent" miles/day, then you should limit it on the "Search" screen (e.g. to include your recent 3 months of data only).

After all, if you still thinks that aCar calculates it wrong, please take a full backup of your data and send it to me for further analysis.

 

[Armond]

can someone xplain to me why it looks like this when exporting to excel? (.csv)
(Iv'e highlighted the number in question)
,"12/30/2010 - 18:03","2

 

[Armond]

I would like to see a feature to track tire mileage in the same manner as fuel where after a tire changeover you would get the cost per mile given a specific tire type. This feature should also have the notion of multiple sets of tires so if I have summer tires and Snow tires, I can record a changeover and then I can get a comparison of mileage between summer and snow tires as well.

I can do most of that in Excel with an export feature but the app should know which set of tires is on the car at which time and determine which miles were put on which set. You could also get mpg on summer tires versus snow tires...

Another feature would be a categorization for service types. I have tracked my vehicles in the past where I seperate routine maintenance from repairs and then track my cost per mile on maintenance versus repairs. routine maintenance would be oil changes, brakes and the like, repairs would be replaced alternators etc... I could try the tag field but a categorization would be better.

It's hard to keep everyone happy when you have hundreds of thousands of users. What I usually do is to prioritize the features based on the votes I receive. Frankly, I've not received many votes for tracking tire mileage or even oil level so I still keep them in the bottom of my list.

My limited experience says that by implementing a major not-so-much-anticipated-and-requested feature I lose lots of average users who want a simple app just to do the job, not a SAP-like software with tons of (sometimes confusing) features and customizations.

 

[Armond]

Because if I open my export in Excel, save it as a csv and then try to open the csv file in acar, I always get an error message saying that "the file I am trying to import does not have the expected data fileds/columns or the data records are not in expected format"

Please send me the original exported Excel file as well as your converted CSV file you're trying to import from. I will try to import it here to reproduce the problem.

 

[Armond]

I've recently migrated to aCar from TealAuto on my Palm Treo. I donated within the first day of use and I'm loving the app.

Unfortunately, I imported all of my data which is in kilometers & Litres before setting the default configuration in aCar from Miles and Gallons. Of course, if I make the switch now, all of my data gets converted. I figure that the easiest method to fix this is to export all of my data in miles and Gallons, run the conversion to kilometers and Litres and export again, update the file that was exported in miles and gallons putting km and L in the appropriate columns and import it back in again. A couple of questions arise from this thought process.

-If I empty the Fuel Efficiency column in the exported spreadsheet, will aCar recalculate that after the import?

-How do I go about deleting all of my existing data to get a clean slate in aCar prior to re-importing?

Ever thought about offering the option to enter records in Litres and Kilometers but efficiency in MPG? TealAuto did that and I guess I got used to it. Some of us Canadians raised just prior to the switchover still think in both units.

Starting from 2.5.3 (released on Feb 09, 2011), you can change the units without converting your data. You will be asked whether to convert or not.

 

[Armond]

Can you tell me where the backups are kept on my phone? Is there any way to keep them on the SD card?

They're already stored on your phone SD-Card at the following directory:
/data/com.zonewalker.acar/

The backup files have ".abp" extension.

 

[Armond]

I am wondering if you can have two vehicles in this software with one being in kilometers and the other in miles as I have two cars and one is imported from the US with the other being bought here in Canada? Thanks

Unfortunately not possible at the moment. The units are set in application level not vehicle level.

But it's already in my feature request list to implement this.

 

[Armond]

First want to say, I love this app. This app is a must have on my phone... I work at a data company, and this does exactly what I want it to do with all of the information it keeps in its database. Also very glad that I can export my data and play around with it if I want to.

I am excited for future enhancements to the product. I think you should look into integrating with other online gas services like what users suggested above as well as gasbuddy maybe.

What is the next enhancement we should expect?

Also--can you add the ability to mass update the service reminders? I don't want to know about service reminders but it forces all of them to be enabled if I add one (I think). I don't remember what I did, but I remember adding in a new service type and it automatically started alerting me to do maintenance...

As I've stated in my initial post today, I'm currently working to release some translations. Then I will try to pay more attention to integrate some online services.

As for service reminders, you can silence the current active ones (from Reminders screen) if you mean to silence them temporarily or you can go to Settings and totally turn off the notifications to disable them permanently and you won't get any notifications after then (you can still see the active reminders on "Reminders" screen).

 

[Armond]

Just been looking through the data on my phone after having some wild MPG figures - as careful as i was driving at the weekend, my GTi certainly didnt make over 51mpg lol

The math for this appears incorrect and from exporting the data to Excel and checking it, most certainly is wrong.

I'm using version 2.5.5, release date Apr 04, 2011

Your app calculation - 51.278
Actual MPG Calcuation - 32.927

From looking at it in Excel its using the wrong fillup record to calculate the MPG.

Your calcuation is working like this....

(Latest ODO - 2nd ODO) / Latest Fillup Volume

It needs to be this...

(Latest ODO - 2nd ODO) / 2nd Fillup volume (as this is the fuel thats been used travelling from 2nd ODO reading to the latest fillup)

Hope that makes sense and can be fixed soon.

The MPG is assigned to the first fillup and this has been done on purpose. Please read the FAQ for the reasoning behind:
"Why doesn't the last fill-up record have any Fuel Efficiency (MPG) assigned to it?"

 

[Armond]

I used to use Cars, a HanDBase applet that only used trip meter data for fill up calculations. It was easier to use quickly at the pump and a 'missed fill up' didn't skew the results, it was easy to fix.

aCar supports Missed Fill-Ups concept. If you miss a fill-up or more, just mark the next fillup as "Missed Fill-Ups" and the calculations will go all fine.

Please let me know if you've discovered any bug here.

 

[Armond]

I recently switched from Iphone 4 to the Atrix and I'm having a problem importing my data from Gas Cubby to ACar. I have put everything on my SDCard and when I go to import it is saying there are no files found? I have tried everything I can think of but still can't figure it out. Please help.

aCar expects to find your Gas Cubby files (*.csv) in the following directory on your SD-Card:
/data/com.zonewalker.acar/

Of course some of Motorola phones tend to map their internal memory as external SD-Card. So if an Android app requests the path to the SD-Card, they return the path to the internal memory instead!!! So you may try to copy your files to the same path on your phone internal memory:
/data/com.zonewalker.acar/

Also disconnect your phone from your computer when you want to import/export data. aCar (or any other Android app) can't access your SD-Card while it's mounted on your computer.

 

[Armond]

I was actually looking for something to record trips for work so i can claim mileage every month when I ran across acar. So far I think it's fantastic as a vehicle tracking tool and I will be making a donation.

Now, when it comes to the trips I'm finding it lacking, at least as my as my requirements go.

For work I have to record individual trips with portions 0f kilometers (no rounding allowed or wanted). Every day's trips are then amalgamated to a daily total (including decimals) and recorded on the monthly report. The monthly report then totals the kilometers (including decimals) and multiplies by the $/KM rate (0.52 right now) for the total milage claim.

Where I find acar to be a bit of a pain is the trip summaries don't include time, odometer reading (probably ending best) or show decimals for the distance travelled. This means I have to go into every trip to find the accurate distances and the ending odometer reading.

What I'd love to see is a daily summary view showing only a single day's trips with odometer reading (with decimal), time of day, and distance (with decimal) and ending with a total distance travelled so I don't have to write the odometer readings down and switch to a calculator view to get the daily total and switch back to acar for the next day.

Hmm, does any of that make sense? Perhaps just try and envision yourself on the 31st having to fill in a form showing everywhere you went each day with a beginning of day and end of day odometer reading with total distance travelled for the whole month.

Oh yeah, personal trips are interspersed so we can't go simply by morning and night odometer - it has to be trip start and end totalled up.

Thanks!

Thanks a lot for your detailed feedback. I've recorded your requests and will try to address them as much as I can if I receive more votes for.

 

[Armond]

Quoting myself here - this developer seems to have stopped responding. Too bad, it's a great program, I hope he comes back....

Sorry guys for my late replies!

 

[Armond]

Great app. Just donated. Hope the developer comes back.

I have created different Fuel Specs for different brands of Unleaded RON95 and RON98 because here in Australia the formulation/additives is apparently different for each brand. Some people swear they get better performance and fuel economy on one brand compared to another. I wanted to use aCar to help me test that theory.

However, on various charts (eg Avg L/100 Cmp), whilst it tracks each Fuel Spec separately as I wanted, the LABELS on the charts only say "95 Octane", "98 Octane" etc so I get multiples of each and I can't tell which is Shell and which is Caltex.

I want the Labels on the charts to be based on the GRADE field of the Fuel Spec, not the Octane rating.

Actually you should have used "Brand" field on New Fill-Up screen instead of the Grade.

Adding Fuel Efficiency chart based on "Brand" is already in my todo list and I will consider it in a future version.

 

[reinbeau]

Sorry guys for my late replies!

Doesn't matter now, you're back! Whew, you spent a lot of time playing catchup!

 

[Holydoc]

"miles/day" is calculated by "Total Miles / Total Days" formula. And it means that it's a value for your entire data (from day one). If you need to have your "recent" miles/day, then you should limit it on the "Search" screen (e.g. to include your recent 3 months of data only).

After all, if you still thinks that aCar calculates it wrong, please take a full backup of your data and send it to me for further analysis.

Armond,

Welcome Back! I am not sure what was causing the problem, but the latest version seems to have fixed it.

I just want to say your program has been a great asset to me in calculating the cost of running my car. Items such as the avg Miles Driven/day, MPG, and cost/day (maintenance) has made budgeting for the car a breeze. Thanks again!

One of the enhancements I would like to see is the ability to sync autos across phones. In other words, the program works great as long as I always drive my car and fill it up. However if my wife takes out my car and fills it up, she must remember to bring a receipt home with her. It would be nice if she could enter the information about my car in her phone and have it update my phone with the new data.

This is one App that I really am glad that I was able to make a donation to show my appreciation for it and the developers dedication to it.

 

[SammyQ2]

Hi Armond.
I started using aCar around the first of the year and it has really simplified record keeping. I back it up by e-mailing the csv to my gmail account after every trip. So far so good. I love it and I donated for the app.

A couple of months ago, all of a sudden, all of my mileage ratings have gone way up (doubled?). For instance my Camry gets around 29 mpg, but now it shows something like 58 mph on all the fill up records, and it did the same for both of our cars.

For instance, my very first fill-up for my Camry on January 5, 2011. If I look at the fill-up on my CSV back-up, which was created on 1/27/2011, I added 6.649 gallons and it showed 22.559 MPG.
However, if I look at that same entry in aCar on my Droid X right now, it says 6.65 gal, but 53.2 MPG!

Also, some of my data files have seemed to be corrupted. For instance, I recently from a trip and i inputted the start mileage as 209,357. When I looked at it later today it somehow changed to 338.654.8. Any ideas?
I also noticed that the fuel and currency units had mysteriously changed.
They went from gallons to liters.

So, when did this start? My April 1 backup seems to be fine. The next backup, created on April 29 had the corrupted information, so that narrows the time frame.

I have also noticed that some old fuel purchases are out of whack, showing that I paid $14/gal for gas when $3.90 was more like it.

So, how can I fix this? If you like, I can send you the CSV files.
Thanks Armond.
Sam