Essential iOS Road Trip apps: Road Trip
One of the first automotive apps that I first sought out was an fuel economy/MPG tracker. Being a two car family I love tracking the MPG of our Toyota Prius -- not so much for our Honda Pilot.
After lots of research I ultimately settled on Darren Stone's excellent Road Trip ($4.99, App Store) as the best of the lot when I reviewed it at the end of 2009.
I'm happy to report that even almost two years later, I still put Road Trip at the top of my list of automotive iOS apps.
What's not to like about a logbook app? All drivers have to pay for gas and no one likes doing it, so it makes perfect sense to track your vehicle's fuel economy and to make adjustments that increase it -- and put money back into your pocket.
Road Trip still has best-in-class fuel economy statistics, graphs and quick entry screens and it also tracks maintenance history and expenses. There's also a Road Trip mode that gives you all your statistics (max/min/average fuel price/economy, average cost per day/mile, and totals) on one concise page.
But it hasn't rested on its laurels either, Road Trip has recently added several new features including automated backups to Dropbox with an easy restore option if you lose/wipe/upgrade your device.
With Road Trip the best keeps getting better. It has definitely saved me more than $4.99 in gas but if you're hesitant, check out Road Trip LITE, which is free.
Update: Developer Darren Stone tells me about a cool new iPad version, which is on the horizon:
I'm currently working on an iPad verion of Road Trip and I hope to release it early in the fall. It's been redesigned rather significatly to take advantage of the large iPad screen. New features for the initial iPad version will include a number of additional graphs of various statistics (MPG, $/Gallon, $/Mile, Miles/day), the ability to drill down and inspect graph values (similar to the iPhone Stocks app), and automatic grouping of related service and expense entries.
To recap, my Essential Road Trip apps are: