FuelLog – Car Management. An Excellent Tool to Monitor Fuel Economy
by Jonathan Lonczak
Oct 11, 2011 8:10 AM –
Install
FuelLog – Car Management. Save money by tracking your fuel consumption, costs and maintenance. Track and log your mileage, fuel consumption, maintenance, services and costs of your car or motorbike and know exactly how much your car costs. FuelLog calculates a lot of useful statistics like fuel consumption and economy (e.g. mpg or 1/100km) of your car or other vehicle, total cost and mileage, average cost per distance or gas amount, average cost per month, year and driven distances, expenses and a lot more. Everything is managed in a nice-looking and very easy to use interface.
Price: Free, ~$2.59
Tested on: HTC Droid Incredible 2, Sony Xperia Play
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Excellent application for tracking your vehicle’s fuel economy!
- Tracks many various statistics regarding your cost of fuel, average fill-ups, and everything else pertaining to fuel!
- Easy to use interface!
- Import and Export of Data to SD Card in Paid Version!
- Creates charts based on your information!
- Some options for car maintenance.
Cons
- Car maintenance options are generalized and produce little useful information.
- Does not track car repairs.
- Paid version does not come with enough new features.
Features:
FuelLog Car Management is a simple but effective application to track your vehicles fuel consumption and yearly costs. The application allows you to enter in each of your vehicles’ information, enter in fill-ups, maintenance costs, and calculate the cost of fuel for long trips based on mileage. It also features the ability to import and export vehicle information to your SD card in order for it to be restored at a later date and allows you to choose the units of measure that the application uses to display all of its information.
In order to begin using this application the user will first have to type in their vehicle information. They will be required to enter in at least the make & model, but will also have the option to enter in notes about the vehicle and to select their preferred units of measure for that specific vehicle. I wish they allowed you to track more information about your vehicles in this initial set up screen, but the additional notes field is helpful and having various units of measure could be useful to someone who travels frequently.
After typing in your vehicle information you are able to begin using the application. Each time you fill up your vehicle you type in your vehicle’s odometer readings, the amount of fuel purchased, the price of the gas, and whether or not it was a partial fill up. This allows the application to make the appropriate calculations for the chart section in order to determine your mpg, cost per day, cost per fuel up, and so on.
FuelLog Car Management is primarily a fuel management and tracking application, but it does have a generic costs tracker built into the application which can be used to monitor car maintenance and repairs. The Costs section of the application allows you to record the type of cost, the odometer reading, the amount of the cost, and whether or not the cost will recur or not. This portion of the application can be useful to track small repairs or yearly car maintenance, but is nowhere near as detailed or effective as the cost tracker’s built in to other competing applications like aCar.
Finally, this application collates all of this information and turns it in to useful information in the stats portion of the interface. Stats records a huge list of statistics including: best fuel consumption, average fuel consumption, worst fuel consumption, total monthly costs, average fuel cost per mile, total fill-ups, total mileage and much much more. You can also view graphs of these statistics in this same area of the application by selecting the option for graphs and choosing the graph you desire. I was extremely impressed with the amount of information that was calculated about my car’s fuel economy; and found that it would be extremely useful if you were determined to save money by reducing your gas costs in our current economy with astronomic gas prices. I also was very pleased that all of this information could be backed up and restored later if I needed to continue my work on another device when I upgrade in the future.
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Fuel Log Car Management Fill Ups
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Fuel Log Car Management Costs
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Fuel Log Car Management Graphs
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Fuel Log Car Management Stats
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Fuel Log Car Management Calc
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Fuel Log Car Management Car Info
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Fuel Log Car Management Maintenance Add
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Fuel Log Car Management Add Fill Ups
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Fuel Log Car Management Settings
Usefulness:
FuelLog Car Management is a useful application to track your car’s fuel economy on multiple levels. It helps you to better evaluate your fuel costs and breaks down all of the important information in to easy to understand and well classified statistics.
Unfortunately the application’s usefulness is limited more than I would like. It is not very effective at tracking and evaluating the various maintenance and repairs that are frequently needed on your vehicle. It also does not provide the ability to import or export saved data files for the application in the free version; as well as blocking you from seeing as detailed information in the charts provided within the application. Many other competitor’s provide more options for maintenance tracking along with better backup options than the free version of this application. Hopefully, it incorporates more features in to both its paid and free versions in the future.
Ease of Use:
I found the application easy enough to use. One of the things I liked about it is that it broke down all of your options very well and forced you to fill out all the important fields while giving you the option to ignore less important ones. The streamlined interface makes it easy for anyone to just pick up and use.
Frequently Used:
I do not see myself using this application much in the future. Although I appreciate what this application has to offer, I do not find that I need quite as much information about my vehicle’s fuel economy as this application has to offer. Instead, I find it more useful to keep track of basic car maintenance and in its current state it leaves a lot to be desired in the area of car maintenance.
Another big detractor to using it is the fact that only the paid version supports information back up. I change phones frequently in my line of work, and also experiment with different ROMs on my devices almost weekly. With constant device changes and system formats information backup to the SD card is essential for an application to be put in my daily repertoire.
Interface:
The interface for the application was plain and straightforward. I like the streamlined feel of it and I appreciate how easy it is to utilize the many options as a consumer. Overall, I was fairly pleased with the interface of the application, but I would like to see more attention paid to the aesthetics of the application and making it more visually attractive. Many times I have kept applications on my phone that I never use just because they look good, so a well designed interface on a well designed application doubles that application’s appeal.