Drive

Drive is a vehicle telemetry app that turns the phone already in your car into a telemetry rig. Its maker describes it as capturing g-force, braking and cornering data — "the whole trace" of a drive — and as flagging license plate reader cameras as you approach them. The product is aimed at people who want driving data from an old weekend car rather than through professional motorsport equipment, and it is delivered as an iOS app available on the App Store. There is no wiring loom, no dongle and no laptop involved, and no sign up is required to use it. The maker summarises the intent simply as "Just driving fun." Drive came out of a personal gap described by its maker, Andy Kim, who says he spent a few years as a design lead on autonomous driving for Android Auto — "the work of making a car drive itself well" — and then spent his weekends in a 27-year-old car doing precisely the opposite, badly, for fun. Drive is what came out of that gap. The problem the product targets is stated explicitly in the maker's own framing: the category it competes against costs $800 to $3,000 and involves a wiring loom, while the phone in a driver's pocket has had an accelerometer, a gyroscope and GPS built into it for a decade. The maker calls that gap "most of the product." In other words, much of what a basic vehicle telemetry setup needs already exists in the device most drivers carry with them every day, which is the observation the entire product is built around. The core of Drive is telemetry capture. According to the product description, Drive records g-force, braking and cornering, described as "the whole trace." These are the elements the maker calls out consistently: what the car is doing under load through corners, what is happening under braking, and the g-forces involved. Rather than requiring a wiring loom or a dongle to read data from the vehicle's own systems, Drive uses the sensors already present in the phone that is in the car. For a driver running a weekend car on a favourite road, that means the trace information associated with a dedicated logger, captured without installing anything in the vehicle. The maker frames the product around exactly this idea: the instrumented drive without the instrumented car. Drive also flags license plate reader cameras as you come up on them. The maker explains that this feature started as a personal itch, having noticed Flock cameras everywhere. Within the app, the result is an alert as the driver approaches a license plate reader (LPR) location. This is a privacy-oriented capability rather than a performance one, and it sits alongside the telemetry features rather than replacing them, which makes it an unusual combination: a driving and telemetry product that also provides awareness of automated plate reading within the same experience. In the Product Hunt discussion, one commenter called the LPR flagging "the surprise here" and asked where the camera locations come from — whether from a source such as DeFlock's OpenStreetMap layer or the maker's own dataset — but the maker's published description does not state where that data comes from. The setup described is deliberately minimal: no wiring loom, no dongle, no laptop, and no sign up. Each omission corresponds to something the maker identifies as friction in the existing telemetry category. A wiring loom is part of what makes dedicated systems expensive and permanently installed; a dongle is extra hardware to buy, carry and pair; a laptop is part of many data logging workflows; and a sign-up wall adds account creation before the driver can do anything. Drive's stated approach removes all four. The maker's summary — "Just driving fun" — makes the intended experience clear: get in the car, use the phone that is already there, and drive. The overall approach is to treat the phone as the telemetry device. The maker points out that the phone in your pocket has had an accelerometer, a gyroscope and GPS in it for a decade, and positions that existing hardware as the basis for the product, saying "That gap is most of the product." Drive therefore derives its driving data from the phone's own sensors rather than from dedicated hardware reading the vehicle's systems. The maker, who worked on autonomous driving interfaces for Android Auto, describes the product as coming out of the contrast between that professional work and weekend driving in an old car for fun. Drive is distributed as an iOS app, listed on the App Store under the name Drive: G-Force Telemetry. The stated benefit is access to vehicle telemetry without the cost and installation burden of the existing category, which the maker says runs from $800 to $3,000 and involves a wiring loom. Because Drive uses the phone already in the car, there is nothing to wire in, no dongle to plug in, and no laptop required at any point in the described workflow. A second benefit is privacy awareness: the LPR alert gives the driver notice as they approach license plate reader cameras, a feature the maker created after noticing Flock cameras everywhere. The maker also frames Drive as being about enjoyment — "Just driving fun" — rather than a professional engineering workflow, which suggests the intended benefit is quick, low-friction access to driving data. The primary scenario named in the product is the weekend drive. The maker's own story is of spending weekends in a 27-year-old car, and Drive is described as turning the phone already in that car into a telemetry rig capturing g-force, braking and cornering. A second scenario is the driver who is curious about professional-grade data logging: the maker explicitly addresses people who have run a real data logger — AiM, VBOX or Racelogic — and asks what they would miss most going to a phone, saying that list is what he is building from. A third scenario is privacy-oriented driving, where a driver approaching a license plate reader camera gets flagged as they come up on it. All three scenarios share the same setup: a phone, a car, and no additional hardware. Drive is aimed at driving enthusiasts — the maker's own reference point is a 27-year-old car driven for fun on weekends — and at drivers who want telemetry data without the $800–$3,000 spend and wiring loom associated with the existing category. It also speaks to people already familiar with data loggers such as AiM, VBOX and Racelogic, whom the maker invites to describe what they would miss moving to a phone. Privacy-conscious drivers are a further audience, given the license plate reader alerting built in after the maker noticed Flock cameras everywhere. Pricing is free to start, and the product is an iOS app available on the App Store. On Product Hunt it is tagged iOS, Cars and Privacy, and sits in the Maps and GPS category. Drive's proposition is straightforward: the phone already in your car has the accelerometer, gyroscope and GPS needed to record g-force, braking and cornering, so it can serve as a telemetry rig without a wiring loom, a dongle, a laptop or a sign up — while also flagging license plate reader cameras as you approach them. The maker, who designed autonomous driving interfaces for Android Auto, built it out of the contrast between that work and weekend driving in an old car. Free to start and available on iOS, Drive targets the gap between expensive professional data logging and simply enjoying a drive.