aCar – a Feature Packed Car Maintenance Application
by Jonathan Lonczak
Aug 1, 2012 10:10 AM –
Install
aCar is an an all-in-one application to track and manage your car: maintenance, fill-ups, fuel mileage, expenses, and business trips for your vehicle.
Price: Free, $5.99
Tested on: HTC Droid Incredible 2, Samsung Galaxy S3
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Extremely feature packed car maintenance application!
- Allows you to input all vehicle expenses, service records, and fuel information!
- Generates charts and statistics about your vehicle based on saved records!
- Predicts cost of ownership for vehicle!
- Predicts MPG, next fill up, and average cost per gallon!
- Stores all important vehicle information in one place!
- Supports multiple vehicles!
- Allows information import and export to prevent data loss, plus supports more than a score of apps it can import data from!
Cons
- Requires large amounts of data entry in order for the application’s statistics to stay up to date and remain accurate and useful.
Features:
aCar is a car maintenance tracking application for the Android OS. It allows users to input basic information about their car, its mileage, maintenance performed, gas fill ups, etc. After inputting the data it will generate maintenance reminders for the user, determine MPG, set cost projections for car maintenance over the coming years, and provide charts with all of the necessary information to properly and efficiently take care of your vehicle.
In order to set up the application initially you must provide aCar with some basic information about your vehicle(s). It will require you to provide a nickname for your car, the year, make, and model, mileage; and license plates, VIN number, purchase price, insurance information, and tire specifications are optional data points. This allows you to have all the important information about your vehicle at your fingertips and also allows aCar to give better information about your vehicle.
After inputting all of the basic information into the application you will be presented with the home screen. The homescreen has a vehicle selector at the top portion of the application which allows you to easily switch between the records on multiple vehicles. On this screen you are presented with your fill up records, service records, expense records, trip records, add another vehicle, set reminders, see statistics & charts, note car parts, and get vehicle predictions. Each of these options are presented in a simple button format with large icons on a grid making them easy to see and interact with.
The fill up records portion of the application allows you to keep track of the mileage that you are achieving with your vehicles. You are able to input your mileage when filling up the car, the cost of the gasoline, the amount used to fill the vehicle, the total cost of the fill up, note whether it was a partial or missed fill up, and much more. By inputting all of this information into the application you are able to keep a detailed record of your gas mileage and fuel related expenses, which it will translate into easy to understand graphs and statistics in other portions of the app.
The service records section is based off of the same principle. This allows you to record maintenance that you had done on your vehicle such as front and rear brakes, AC, transmission, clutch, etc. This will also record the cost of the services which were required and will generate predictions for future maintenance and total costs to continue to maintain the vehicle.
The expenses area of the application is for recording tickets, accidents, car washes, fines, tolls, and insurance (or enter a new expense should you need to.) This works the same as the others in letting you record the required expenses along with cost in order to provide deeper information and statistics on your vehicle. You can input location into the expense records as well which can be useful for learning which areas may incur parking or speeding tickets, and to prevent future expenses for your vehicle.
aCar then uses all of this information to generate detailed statistics about your vehicle(s) and upcoming maintenance. If you open up the statistics portion of the application it will provide you with information about the total running costs of your vehicle, the running cost/day, the running cost/mile, the distance that you travel every day, total cost of ownership, cost of ownership by day and by mile, total time owned, avg. MPG, avg. cost in dollars per gallon, and the average amount of time between gas tank refills. This information is extremely useful because it allows you to get a detailed look at the money you invest every month into your car and can help you evaluate whether or not it is time to look in to purchasing a new one. The most important thing about this application is that you make sure to input as much information as possible in the records portion, because without the records being filled in properly it will not be able to do its job. All of the information that is provided in the statistics portion is also available in chart form under the charts heading to provide a more visual approach to your car’s information.
The app supports data import from a host of other apps and sources, including My Cars, Gas Cubby, Fuelly.com, or even plain CSV (Excel) format. You get a few options to export records or statistics in CSV or output to an HTML webpage. Lastly, aCar features a few backup options either as full backup, full restore or automatically backup your settings.
Finally, aCar makes predictions about future costs you will incur with your vehicle. It uses the maintenance and fill up information that you have entered to provide predictions on when future tune ups and fill ups will be required. It is able to predict future maintenance by taking the recommendations from the user manual for your vehicle and providing them to you in an application format. This allows you to predict when brakes, rotors, and other maintenance will be needed and to plan for those future expenses.
-
-
aCar All Vehicles Dashboard
-
-
aCar All Vehicles Dashboard 2
-
-
aCar Advanced Dashboard
-
-
aCar Gas Records
-
-
aCar Overall Records
-
-
aCar Search Records
-
-
aCar Predictions
-
-
aCar Charts
-
-
aCar Manage More Services
-
-
aCar Import-Export Center
-
-
aCar Import-Export Center List of Compatible Apps
-
-
aCar Export to Excel CSV
-
-
aCar Export Options
-
-
aCar Settings
-
-
aCar Main
-
-
aCar Graphs
-
-
aCar Fill Up Record
-
-
aCar Everything
-
-
aCar Manage Services
-
-
aCar Predictions
-
-
aCar Reminders
-
-
ACar Trip Records
-
-
aCar Select Services
-
-
aCar Service Records
-
-
aCar Options
-
-
aCar Options 2
-
-
aCar FAQs
-
-
aCar Donate Screen
Usefulness:
aCar is extremely useful if you are willing to input the necessary information. It generates huge amounts of useful information which will allow you to budget properly for car repairs and maintenance in the future. It also allows you to see an accurate picture of the costs of maintaining your vehicle, and helps to show gas mileage and fuel economy. My only complaint with this application is without remedy, you have to input way too much information to see the value in it. I personally do not like having to record every minute detail about my car in to my phone, because it is just one more thing for me to have to do every day. Is it something I should do? Yes, but that being said I probably never will.
Ease of Use:
aCar is easy to use. The interface of the application is designed to allow you easy access to every feature plus extra perks to manage other data points not already pre-filled. The icons are all of a good size to be able to select them easily, and the text inputs are spaced out properly to allow for easy entry. The only thing that is difficult about using this application is motivating yourself to use it, because of the large amount of information necessary to have this application make an accurate analysis of my vehicle.
Frequently Used:
I personally do not use aCar frequently due to the large amount of data entry required to make it work properly. However, if you are the type of person who already maintains a record book on your car, uses it for fleet vehicles/work-related, or who does not mind doing some data entry in order to better plan for your financial future then you will use this application often.
Interface:
The interface to aCar is intuitive and user friendly. The menus are all displayed on screen and are not hidden away from the user, and all of the settings can be imported and exported at will to prevent data loss.
Tags:
aCar,
aCar Track your vehicles,
Android App,
Android Apps,
AndroidTapp.com App Review,
Car,
Car Maintenance App,
Car Maintenance Reminder,
Car Maitenance
Categorised in: Finance, Travel
Submit apps for review,
promote apps, get more installs with better
app videos.