4 Best Apps For Driving

The ever-expanding app universe for smartphones offers some very interesting and practical options for cars. Apps now can measure your car’s performance, and without having to spend an extra dime. These are some apps that can help you on your journey, wherever you’re going and will streamline certain obligations drivers face during road trips.

Gasbuddy—Gas station finder app

When looking for a free gas finding app it’s hard to look past Gasbuddy, available for iPhone and Android. It’s a quick-running app that sorts nearby gas stations by distance and price. While the interface is lightly infiltrated by advertisements, the app is intuitive and doesn’t require a login or sign up of any kind to start using.

Gauges—Accelerometer app

If you’re a driver who wants to know what’s up with their car’s performance in terms of speed and lateral acceleration, Gauges is a good place to start. With GPS it has a speedometer, altimeter, barometer, accelerometer and a magnetometer. All this the app offers, and at no charge. However, in order to unlock the full potential of the app, which includes recording the stats, you’ll need to fork over a minimal $2.99, a price that seems pretty worth it if you’re going to be using the app a lot. If you want a simple speedometer app the Speedometer Speed Box is a good option as well. It looks good, calculates the distance traveled as well as average and max speeds.

Waze—Map and navigation app

Navigation apps depend a lot on the data that’s available, and since Waze was bought by Google in 2013, it’s become a standard along with Google Maps. Its traffic data is crowdsourced, which means other Waze users contribute information to the Waze community, and not only does it navigate but it offers real time traffic reports, police car hideouts and a variety of different voices that spout directions at you while you’re driving. Waze certainly took off, and it’s a very nice app that does its job well, however, there is another app that deserves some attention, called Tomtom, which provides offline navigation. Tomtom is far from perfect due to the lack of features and not-so-user-friendly interface. It’s certainly not a free app but it does offer offline navigation which can be supremely handy in rural areas with next minimal cell reception.

Fuel Monitor by Linklinks LTD—driving efficiency app

For measuring fuel efficiency, thre is the Fuel Monitor app by Linklinks LTD. It’s one of the only free apps that measures gas mileage that is doing moderately well with reviews, and it also measures your cost of fuel per miles, and allows you to record any repairs and services done on your car. Basically it’s a very comprehensive way of keeping track of how much money you’re spending on your car, and if you’re getting your money’s worth. A free app that tracks your mileage is a bit difficult to find, but Fuel Monitor seems to be the one filling that void.

Some of these apps still have some ways to go with their development, but they’ve all improved a great deal since their genesis. While some might not offer as many features or uses as paid versions, as basic utilities they do their job well, and can certainly sustain the average driver who is after some fairly comprehensive driving data.