Last year I started tracking my car and motorcycles fuel economy and costs. For this I used Fuelly and their app aCar, a proprietary app from the Google Play Store. I chose this app because the website already had a bunch of data on fuel economy and cost of other vehicles.
The app works alright although it does serve ads. From the reviews I can gather that they first sold a Pro version and later on switched the Pro features to a subscription model and essentially killing the previously paid features.
Things I don’t like about the app:
- The graphs are ugly
- Too many options to fill in
- Not able to set up a recurring expense such as road tax and insurance
- Last update is from 2018
- Not opensource
During my Year of FOSS I set out to switch my applications with FOSS versions. The replacement for Fuelly became CarReport from F-Droid. The data formats from these apps don’t match. Fuelly does have an option to import data in other formats but not to export it. Why would they? As it would lead users to other apps.
So I had to do some data wrangling myself to move the 2 csv files from Fuelly into 4 needed for CarReport. I set up some Python code and used Pandas to read and transform the data. You can find the code here. Currently I am still working on it as I have multiple vehicles that need to be imported(Car and motorcycle).
The downside with CarReport is that my data is not easily shared with other users. The attraction of Fuelly or other such websites is the vast amount of fuel economy data. Now maybe not everyone bases their car purchase only on fuel economy but I imagine it is a great part of it. It also is a good way to check if your driving style is the most efficient. Although Fuelly is not the best website on this for me, it is biased towards the US and some parts of Asia. I am still looking for the best way to either share my data with these sites are just share it on my own site.
