feature requests

[ThatGuyDuncan]

some easily-implemented additions could increase site value

Allow me to enter the name of my retailer. When tracking via spreadsheet, I found fuel economy jumped a kilometre/litre when I swtiched from Esso to Shell, and other friends swear they get the best economy from PetroCanada. If we could aggregate by retailer, we could validate the claim.

Track my odometre against my lease. Most leases have a cap on how many kilometres you can drive within the monthly payment, after which you have to pay extra. I used to track my performance against my lease so I would know when to stop driving so much.

[mathowie]

1. that's interesting. For now you can either use tags or the notes field to enter the name of the retailer, but we've talked about someday letting you pick the exact station (name and location) on fuel-ups as an option.

2. I haven't heard of monthly lease mileage limits before. In the US, they just give you one number, a total miles during the term of the lease, so you have say, 3 years go to a certain number of miles. This could be an option down the line after we get a lot of other features up and running.

[bonehead]

One possible cause is ethanol content.

In Canada, at least, it's very common now to potentially have up to 15% ethanol in gas. As ethanol has ~70% the energy content/litre of gasoline, a higher ethanol content gas will have higher consumption by your car.

I don't know how much or how often ethanol is mixed into commercial blends at the pump right now---the retailers treat this as confidential in Canada at present. There's no public data on this that I am aware of.

In short, this would be a very interesting thing to track.

[ThatGuyDuncan]

Mathowie:

1. I'm using the tags, but I don't have the capacity to do any sort of custom query, so far as I can see. In other words, unless I can GROUP BY my tags, there's not much value to them.

2. That's also what we get in Canada: a discrete limit for the end of the lease. From that I just divided by the number of days elapsed, and I knew how many kilometres I could drive in a day, on average (something like 55Km). I was able to see, "If I keep driving like this, I'll owe $1,600 in penalties when I had the car back."

Bonehead:

Excellent point. Once the tags are up and running, we could see "price/Km rolled up by retailer". We wouldn't need to know ethanol content, and also wouldn't care which retailer was cheaper per litre, since a lower ethanol ratio would be more expensive (per litre) and take us further -- it's possible that a more expensive gasoline per litre is less expensive per Kilometre. Did that make sense?

Mathowie:

Can we get our own data back out of your system, even just as XML or something? One of the reasons I kept my numbers was so I could run whatever queries I wanted. When I enter my data in this site, unless I keep parallel numbers I lose that ability. I'm also not able to validate my own data -- unless I'm missing something, once I enter a fuel-up I can only see aggregates, never my raw data again.

Thanks guys;

Duncan

[pb]

I'm using the tags, but I don't have the capacity to do any sort of custom query, so far as I can see.

Duncan, go to your vehicle profile page and click the View All Fuel-ups link under the recent fuel-ups table. That's how you get to your fuel-up log. Under any particular fuel-up, click a tag and you'll see only those fuel-ups with that particular tag. We have a lot of work to do to provide statistics by tag but at least you can group by them.

Can we get our own data back out of your system, even just as XML or something?

Yep, we have an export feature.