We saw a couple of car hacks during our Disrupt SF Hackathon today. One that stood out for me was BetterDriver.Club. Mike and Peter Tuszynski, two brothers who flew in from Poland to participate in the event, had originally planned to build a healthcare app.
But after seeing the $149 Vinli OBD-II plug, which combines an LTE hotspot with the ability to read data from a cars’ sensors, they decided to build an iOS app for drivers instead.
“We wanted to so something good – not just another stupid crazy app — but something hopefully useful,” Peter told me.
Like some already existing tools, BetterDriver.Club looks at your driving data like fuel economy and the number of rapid accelerations and stops. Then it takes this data and calculates a driving score for you.
That’s interesting, but the app then puts a twist on this and gamifies the experience by allowing you to compete with your friends — and maybe win some money if you’re driving well. Everybody puts in $5 per month (the team used the MasterCard API for this) and then at the end of the month, the top 50 percent of drivers get their money — plus $5 — back (though I’m not quite sure how this would work when you have an uneven number of friends on the service). The losers, of course, get nothing.
Peter and Mike tell me they still want to spruce up the user interface experience before they launch the project in the App Store, so keep your eyes open for it later this year.
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