There was a time when the closest you could get to communicating with your car was pleading with it to just get you to the next petrol station. With a slew of apps and advances in in-car OSes, that’s changing fast.
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That’s all well and good if your car’s new, but what if you’re driving something a little more vintage? Surely it deserves as much, if not more, attention as any modern car. Well that’s the problem Clickdrive is trying to fix.
Founded by Mark Sutheran and Rishi Saraswat, the device is meant to turn any car into a connected car within seconds. Once connected, you pair Clickdrive with a number of custom apps on your smartphone. Apps available for Clickdrive include a wide array of tools that are meant to help to avoid troublesome situations as well as to make life easier in the inevitable event that something goes wrong.
Among these apps are configurable dashboards that will display real-time information previously hidden from the driver and cloud-backed monitoring that will track your carâ€
Clickdrive also says there will be a Blackbox app, which “allows car owners to record all essential driving data into a secure Drive Data Recorder, which can then be used to provide evidence in case of an accident”.
The API for the device (which is still in the concept stages) will also be open, meaning that developers can created their own apps. “We see the Internet of Cars coming soon and with our Open API, anyone with basic App skills can now create a car-connected App,†says Sutheran.
So far, the Clickdrive team claims to have worked out a strong prototype “that works — and works well”.
The company has a crowdfunding campaign up on Indiegogo in a bid to get a second prototype out there.
