EVmote App

[cryptyk]

Just read an article in todays Wall Street Journal where various auto insurance companies are trying hard to get access to telemetry data from their insured customers.... in one sense they are trying to find high risk drivers.... looking for those who aggressively accelerate and slow down (jam on the brakes with deceleration of > 7 MPH per second). I would hope that you do not make the trip data available to anyone other than the original subscriber. I suspect you need to publish a policy statement regarding the data captured.

I do need to make a privacy policy. I'll do it today. Here's the short version: it's your data, not mine. I'm just securely storing it for you. I'll never give it or sell it to anyone.

There are two ways your data is shared:
1). When you tell me to share it. For example, when you use the live trip sharing feature and tell me to let someone see your location.
2). In aggregate for reporting features. For example, I might tell a user that they drove further this week than 90% of EVmote drivers. This requires that I look at everyone's data to calculate the statistics. Even then, your personal statistics are private to you.

Hope that helps,
Ryan

 

[Majerus]

Could you add a demo account, for those of us that want to look at it before putting in credentials?

 

[cryptyk]

Could you add a demo account, for those of us that want to look at it before putting in credentials?

Good idea. I don't have that yet. For what it's worth, you can create an account, play with it, then delete your account. When you delete your account, I remove all of your data, including GPS data.

 

[mikeash]

Yah - These are good thoughts. It's kind of a rock and a hard place, though. If I say that Free only stores 10 trips, then people upgrade and find out I've been storing all of their data, they might be upset. It's not about storage cost, as you pointed out. It's incredibly cheap to store all of the GPS data for a few hundred cars. It really comes down to what the best customer experience is. What do you think? If you were a free user for a month, then upgraded, would you want to see all of your trips? Would you expect that to be disclosed, etc?

Would love ya'll's thoughts.

Good point about people being upset if it turns out you've been storing all of their data.

I think that if I were a free user for a month and then upgraded, I would not expect to see all of my trips but I might be pleasantly surprised.

Maybe there's a time factor here. Show a week, store a month (or two). If somebody uses the free service for a year I can see where they might find it very disturbing that all of their old data is still there if they subscribe. For a month, maybe not.

This is definitely a tricky area. I used to work on an audio recording app which had a free trial. The trial worked by overlaying static on recordings after ten minutes. This let people try out all features of the app, but made it so you had to pay to use it for serious work. We'd get users writing in for help because they didn't understand the trial limitations, used the free version for something important, and then wanted us to recover their static-laden recording. Or just got upset with us that the recording didn't magically become pristine after the fact when they paid. We discussed various schemes to make recovery possible, but we could never come up with something that didn't feel like we were holding users hostage.

 

[Father Bill]

Hi, If this has already been adressed please ignore. I have scanned the thread but haven't seen anything about putting a label on each trip. I hope to use this for Work Mileage and having a field that I can fill in for each trip would be very useful. I can always do that with the .csv but having the map helps me to remember what each trip is for.

Thanks,

Father Bill

 

[cryptyk]

Definitely on my list

The trip tracker was one of the first things I built, and it's in need of some love.

Thanks,
Ryan

 

[Golightly]

Hi,
I'm a free user of the site and I'm deciding whether the premium features are a necessity or a luxury for my current situation. Do you think you might offer discounted pricing for semi-annual or annual subscriptions?

 

[cryptyk]

Hi,
I'm a free user of the site and I'm deciding whether the premium features are a necessity or a luxury for my current situation. Do you think you might offer discounted pricing for semi-annual or annual subscriptions?

I've thought about it before and it's something I would love to do.
However: At this point, EVmote is still an experiment. If, at some point in the future, I realize that I won't be able to recoup server costs through subscriptions, I want the flexibility to shut it down. Right now, monthly subscriptions let me shut it down at any point with 30 days notice. If I have annual subscribers, that gets more tricky.

If I get to a point where I decide that long term the project is sustainable, I'll reconsider annual subscriptions at a discount.

Thanks,
Ryan

 

[orlenok]

Hi,

They new emails are really cool. Just wanted to report a small bug : the days of the week on the miles driven chart appear to be shifted by 1. Also if it was possible to localize km vs miles, that would be terrific.

Many thanks for this application.

 

[Majerus]

Few things, How do you turn on and set HVAC, as well as where is the option to upgrade to PRO?

 

[cryptyk]

They new emails are really cool. Just wanted to report a small bug : the days of the week on the miles driven chart appear to be shifted by 1. Also if it was possible to localize km vs miles, that would be terrific.

Many thanks for this application.

Oops! I'll fix the off-by-one problem.
I plan to localize km/mph, currency, electricity, and gas rates. Just wanted to get the email system working first

Few things, How do you turn on and set HVAC, as well as where is the option to upgrade to PRO?

HVAC isn't in the UI yet, but you can do it via IFTTT. I'll put it in the UI very soon!

Pro upgrade can be found by trying to do something that's only in the Pro version, like download your trip history, etc.

Thanks!
Ryan

 

[detlefo]

Really appreciate your app. I've been using it for some time and fully support your going to a paid pro version. I would prefer paying using Paypal so am still holding out to see what happens. One minor annoyance is the segmentation of trips. Out of garage = trip 1, stop at mailbox = trip 2, then every stop on the journey generates another trip. Is it possible to concatenate all the trips for a day into a single trip as an option. That would be awesome.

 

[Majerus]

Really appreciate your app. I've been using it for some time and fully support your going to a paid pro version. I would prefer paying using Paypal so am still holding out to see what happens. One minor annoyance is the segmentation of trips. Out of garage = trip 1, stop at mailbox = trip 2, then every stop on the journey generates another trip. Is it possible to concatenate all the trips for a day into a single trip as an option. That would be awesome.

Really it seems like it should wait for Park to be selected before stopping the trip calculation. If park is selected for more then 2 mins stop trip.. or something

 

[HankLloydRight]

Or as I suggested before, a user selectable option: Discard all trips less than ____ miles or ____ minutes.

Because I take lots of very short trips (<5 miles each), I find the trips page (before the pay options) almost impossible to use to find the few longer trips I took to analyze/keep just those.

Also the "paging" options on that page are only mouse driven and have no keyboard access keys, and paging is painfully slow, so pretty useless to me. I also can't use the arrow keys to move up/down to select trips -- only the mouse.

 

[cryptyk]

Or as I suggested before, a user selectable option: Discard all trips less than ____ miles or ____ minutes.

Because I take lots of very short trips (<5 miles each), I find the trips page (before the pay options) almost impossible to use to find the few longer trips I took to analyze/keep just those.

Also the "paging" options on that page are only mouse driven and have no keyboard access keys, and paging is painfully slow, so pretty useless to me. I also can't use the arrow keys to move up/down to select trips -- only the mouse.

How long do you stop for on those trips? I'd rather "ignore" stops less than 5 minutes or something, so a trip with short stops (parking adjustments, getting the mail, dropping something off) looks like one continuous trip.
What do ya'll think a good timeframe is? 5 minutes? 10?

 

[HankLloydRight]

How long do you stop for on those trips? I'd rather "ignore" stops less than 5 minutes or something, so a trip with short stops (parking adjustments, getting the mail, dropping something off) looks like one continuous trip.
What do ya'll think a good timeframe is? 5 minutes? 10?

That's the thing, they're not "stops", they're just very short trips with long "stops" in between (several hours, days, etc).

I think the important things are the long trips where you have mileage more than some set parameter (say 5 miles). If I'm running around town, and each stop is short, that total "trip" (without stops) doesn't really interest me in terms of looking at stats of speed or energy used, etc. And a trip with lots of short stops isn't going to have very good status information anyway (high Wh/m etc). I'm really just interested in the longer trips where analyzing energy use matters. Like I sugested before, I'd like to see a user settable parameter to ignore/delete/discard all trips less than a set mileage. That information is basically useless to me, and makes it very hard to find the 5% of total trips that are longer in nature and much more interesting.

 

[OverZealous]

My vote would be no longer than 5 minutes. I'd hate to lose some of the max speed / energy used data on our regular round trips to daycare, etc. It's interesting seeing the difference between the trip there and back.

However, another argument for basing it on distance (too) is I don't need to see things like backing the car out into the driveway to wash it, or simliar movements that aren't necessarily followed by a regular drive somewhere.

That being said, having a better interface for browsing trips would probably make a bigger difference than cleaning up short trips. As it is, it's almost impossible to find the more interesting trips, simply because they get lost after a few weeks of regular driving.

- - - Updated - - -

Like I sugested before, I'd like to see a user settable parameter to ignore/delete/discard all trips less than a set mileage.

Even just adding some basic filtering & sorting to the current trips based on distance or time would be nice, and might be easier.

 

[cryptyk]

Got it.
It sounds like it's not really about hiding or aggregating trips. It's *really* about how hard it is to sift through the noise to look at the trips that are "interesting". Lots of small trips get in the way.

Let me think about a good way to solve it and mock up some different options.

The reason I'm being "difficult" and not just putting the options in is that I want the site to remain streamlined. I *love* VT, but I'm not trying to re-create it.

 

[mochouinard]

Got it.
It sounds like it's not really about hiding or aggregating trips. It's *really* about how hard it is to sift through the noise to look at the trips that are "interesting". Lots of small trips get in the way.

Let me think about a good way to solve it and mock up some different options.

The reason I'm being "difficult" and not just putting the options in is that I want the site to remain streamlined. I *love* VT, but I'm not trying to re-create it.

In case it help, what I've done on TeslaLog is hide all trip shorter than 500meters. I had so much trip that was useless like moving my car to a different parking spot, or going to a different store close by. Generated lot of useless entry. The 500meters rules seem to be working pretty good.

I got no idea how your UI look like, but what I've done is group every trip or charge per day, so you can quickly see your total. I used to show trip of over ~150km in bold but after a changed I removed it, no idea why... Well it back now lol. You can also tag certain trip that will show in the day list. My next step is a filter at the top of that page, where you can select geo location of interest, range of travel, tags... I know I'm lazy, and thing need to happen automaticly. 90% of my travel is always to the same location, so with geo tagging all the place I normally go, in my day trip, it clean of where I went. If you have user that have always different destinations, that a whole different use case. It not going to be your primary user anyway.

 

[Cymro]

Hi,
Enjoying playing with the app. I have a couple of questions:
Are all the car images white ? can't you get the 'mothership' settings and render the correct colour ?
My inside and outside temperatures never show, the refresh wheels just keep turning.

Cymro
Obsidian Black 85D