New Apple iPhone Download Provides Instant Notification of Car Speed and Acceleration Violations

By Frank Poulin

I just tried the Basic (free) version of Dangerous Decisions’ Safe Driver iPhone app on my way to and from dinner at a restaurant that, although not that far from my home, was certainly a long enough trip to test out the app.

First, the basics. The purpose of this app is to monitor the movements of your vehicle while you drive and alert you when your driving becomes excessive. “Excessive” in this case means speeding, accelerating or braking too fast, or cornering too sharply. The app also logs a summary of your trip ~ complete with a map containing the exact location of any violations ~ for later review. You can send an email containing the log directly from the application.

The application seems mainly targeted toward parents wanting to monitor the driving practices of their teenage driver, as well as delivery companies wanting to monitor their employees. However, you can simply use it to moderate your own driving, which, aside from the obvious safety benefits, will help increase fuel efficiency and reduce wear and tear on your vehicle.

The Basic version comes with fixed settings as to the type of vehicle used, speed limit, acceleration speed, etc. This makes it very easy to use (no configuration necessary) while still giving a very good feel for the potential value of the application. However, to get real-life use out of this program you’ll have to spring for the Pro version (which goes for a cool $24.99). The Pro version allows you to customize the type of vehicle (multiple ones in fact), the speed/acceleration/braking/cornering limits as well as whether to send email and text message notifications at the end of each trip. You can also password protect the driving limits to make sure they’re not tampered with en route.

Using the application is extremely simple. Just start the application, select your vehicle settings from the list of available ones and hit the big “Start” button. Your iPhone screen then switches to the following view:

fig. 1
fig. 1

FIGURE 1 (left)

The white ball in the middle represents the g forces to which your vehicle is currently subjected. The red lines represent the preset limits beyond which a violation will be logged. For example, as you accelerate the white ball will move “south” ~ the faster you accelerate, the further south it will move. As the ball approaches the red line the screen will turn yellow and an audible warning signal will sound. If the ball actually goes beyond the red line (i.e. if the g force goes above the preset limit) the screen will turn red, a different sound will be heard and the violation will be logged (along with the location at which it occurred). Similarly, the vehicle’s current speed is displayed at the top of the screen and if the preset speed limit is reached the violation will trigger the alarm and will be logged:

fig. 2
fig. 2

FIGURE 2 (right)

One limitation regarding the speed limit alarm is that it wouldn’t log my driving 54 MPH in a 30 MPH residential area if the application were set to, say, 55 MPH. There might be some room for improvement in that area.

Once you have arrived safely at your destination, simply hit the big “Stop” button. The log file will be saved for later reference and (if you’re running the Pro version) optionally a text message and email containing the log will be sent to a preset recipient.

During my short trip to the restaurant with the application active it only took a few seconds to get familiar with the feedback system. Then, after a few controlled “violations” to experience the warning system (and to generate a few alerts in the log to later see what it looked like) I almost immediately fell into the mostly-unconscious habit of moderating my acceleration and braking maneuvers ~ a psychological effect well-known to anyone driving one of those hybrid cars that give real-time feedback on the fuel consumption.

All in all, there’s a pretty useful set of features and a very intuitive usage model. I was fairly impressed with Safe Driver.

Then I started to wonder: What happens when I get a call? A text message? For that matter, what happens if I need to place a call of my own? In other words, everything’s cool while the app is running but how does it handle interruptions? As it turns out, it could handle them better.

If someone calls your phone while Safe Driver is running, the application is interrupted with the familiar “Decline / Answer” screen. If you decline to answer, the application resumes operation as if nothing happened ~ so far so good. However if you decide to take the call, the application exits then starts again after you hang up. Unfortunately, at that point your driving session is ended and you may not resume it. A log is produced for the interrupted leg of your trip with the mention “App crashed.” Since I haven’t tried the Pro version, I don’t know if an automatic text message / email is sent for the log file (given that the application was interrupted).

Obviously, the same thing happens if you exit the application by pressing the home button on your phone to place a call (or do anything else for that matter) without pressing the “Stop” button in the application to cleanly end your session.

Similarly, when receiving a text message will display the message as a pop-up as usual, and if you cancel the pop-up the application will continue to run as expected. But if you hit “Reply” the app will exit (again reporting “App crashed” in the log).

It seems to me that the application could handle these situations a lot better. If it gets interrupted in the middle of a session, for any reason ~ phone call, actual app crash, whatever ~ once the application restarts it should simply offer to resume the session. Of course since the iPhone doesn’t allow applications to run in the background, any violations that occurred during a phone call would not be recorded (which unfortunately is exactly the time during which violations are likely to occur!) but there’s nothing the application can do about that.

One more issue became apparent even in the short time I used the application: since you need to keep the app running during the entire trip, and since the app needs to use the GPS, compass and accelerometer at all times (not to mention the screen) it puts a serious dent in the phone’s battery life. But here again this is more of an iPhone limitation than a Safe Driver one. Still, there should be ways to at least mitigate the situation by having the software either dim the screen during normal operation (or even turning it off entirely) until a violation occurs, for example. Of course, you could always use a car charger to keep the battery levels from dropping.

On that subject, you should also know that you need to keep your iPhone in the same position at all times during the session, otherwise the jostling will trigger the accelerometers to report false alarms. The application’s help documentation recommends the use of a holder or docking station, and I would go further and say it’s an absolute must.

All in all I consider Safe Driver to be an innovative use of the iPhone capabilities and a generally useful application ~ provided you’re willing to shell out the $24.99 for the Pro version. I understand that the free version is for demo purposes and does a good job of showcasing the software’s capabilities. What I would like to see is a more reasonably-priced intermediate version for us mere mortals. Regardless, the application delivers on everything it promises (and gets extra brownie points for getting me to moderate my driving in less than 5 minutes!)

I would also like to see the battery life and application interruption issues addressed, but that’s what versions 1.1 are for.

The application can be downloaded right onto your iPhone via the iTunes app.

NB: While I had originally tested Safe Driver using my iPhone 3GS running iOS version 3.1.3,  I recently tried to run it again using my new iPhone 4, hoping some of the application interruption issues might be helped by iOS 4.0’s new multitasking features. Unfortunately, the behavior was unchanged. On the bright side, it should now be easier for the development team at Dangerous Decisions to address those issues by taking advantage of the multitasking interface should they choose to do so in a future update.