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I was also extremely confused by the smartphone app requirement. I don't imagine most car guys want to fumble around with their personal, expensive, fragile sm

I was also extremely confused by the smartphone app requirement. I don't imagine most car guys want to fumble around with their personal, expensive, fragile smartphone while doing automotive work. Modern vehicles generally have very advanced media consoles installed in the dash. Why can't they just display the information there? Or just add a standardized port under the hood with a publicly documented interface that mechanics could plug a device into?

bzbarsky 6y ago
I'm not a fan of the smartphone app requirement (as opposed to, say, a web app requirement), not least because it presupposes ownership of a smartphone. But I _think_ the intent is for "normal people" to be able to know at least as much about their own car and its behavior as the manufacturer does, and more importantly to know what it is their manufacturer knows. Importantly, this is all about data that got shipped off wirelessly to the manufacturer and does not reside in the car itself anymore. The media console approach would require the existence of such a console and for the media console to connect to "the cloud" to retrieve the data. Possible, presumably, since the car is connecting somehow to ship the data out to start with, but I'm really not sure what the tradeoffs are there. The standardized port idea unfortunately suffers from that last problem too: it relies on the car itself to make a connection to "the cloud"; depending on what's going on with the car that may or may not be possible, I'd think.