Cars are the most dependable modes of transportation for humans. Existed for over a century now, they are humans' inseparable companions. And companions are made to last.
Still, that doesn't separate them from the fact that they are machines and machines need maintenance. From engine internals to the chassis, nothing is durable enough to stand the harshest situations without proper maintenance.
But, while aging paint, dirty rims, or foggy headlights are something we can immediately take care of, making sure that the internals gets proper maintenance needs more than an odometer reading.
Precisely knowing when your car needs maintenance and at what level, has always been a mystery to most car owners, until now. A Pune-based Indian startup named CarIQ has successfully created an intelligent solution based on IoT that literally enables users to check the stats of their cars just like in video games.
How do CarIQ works?
The Pune-based startup CarIQ created an IoT device in the form of a Bluetooth smart plug. Plugged in your car's OBD port, the device records, and analyses data as you drive your car. The data is then processed by their software and then shown in the CarIQ app in an organized manner. This allows users to access their car's live condition whenever or wherever they want. Not only that, but CarIQ also comes with an abundance of features to keep you and your car in check.
Features offered by CarIQ
Separate from the standard OBD features, CarIQ offers a bunch of additional features as well. From simply showing your vehicle's summary or stats to providing safety and security they have it all.
Starting with the basic, CarIQ-
1. Gives you an economy score per week:
The economy score is a combined score derived from a plethora of drive time data. This data constitutes your driving style, how much fuel saved and spent along with the time you were idling to times you stepped on your gas pedal.
All these data are combined and compared to generate an average weekly score. This not only generates a will for saving resources but can also help new or rash drivers to improve their driving style as they try to beat their previous score as much as possible.
2. Help analyze your Car's health:
Given that the CarIQ device is connected to the OBD port or onboard diagnostic port, it has access to all the information on your car's onboard electronics. Thanks to this, you can now access a plethora of information in the palm of your hand. Allowing you to immediately know what's happening inside your car and if there is anything wrong with it.
Other than your car stats, the CarIQ app also shows individual drive summary, the time you drove, the distance you traveled, your fuel consumption, your economy score, etc. to help make your driving more efficient.
3.Real-time location tracking: Real-time location tracking is something we see in modern smart cars like tesla. However, with older cars, the safety of your car is stuck with dashcams or third-party GPS trackers, none of which are cheap.
But with CarIQ, you get real-time location tracking as an additional feature, allowing you to constantly know where your car is. It also enables you to share your vehicle's location so your car always stays on the radar in any scenario of mishappenings.
Other than the anti-theft feature the app also uses your real-time location to do other cool stuff. For starters, it can track your car health, so during an event of low fuel left, it pinpoints or even navigate you to nearby HP fuel pumps and can give you real-time fuel rates at the moment. Talk about being handy.
4. Reminding and reviewing of car documents:
Last but not the least, it can also review your car documents, say when your documents are about to expire and can help you also renew your documents. I mean, it's super helpful for not only first-time car owners but also for extremely busy people who tend to forget stuff in the midst of tasks.
How is this beneficial?
This might be a question generating on a lot of people’s heads. Why do we need technology suddenly to manage our cars? After all, for centuries, we had a tradition to manage our cars without any external assistance. So how this beneficial?
Technology or tech’s sole purpose is to make our lives simpler. Using tech to complete complex tasks in a matter of seconds is what makes technology a marvel.
Since cars are not really inexpensive pieces of techs and you do need to pay a heavy credit to own them, their maintenance becomes a vital part of its life.
So handing over such tasks to CarIQ will not only help you track things more efficiently but also, can micro-manage a lot of things and give us preponed warnings, which we generally miss, saving us both time and money.
About the author: Shayan is a boy who loves to write as a hobby. Having a keen interest in technology, he has quite a view of the tech world. Being the owner of GamerSquare, he holds the insight to be a part of the Slake IoT Content Management team and we are proud to have him.
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