Road Trip MPG 4+

My previous auto maintenance app was removed from the App Store. When I got a new iPad, I was surprised to see I couldn’t download the program. So I begin searching for another app. I sent an email to Darren asking questions. It was a Sunday morning so I expected a response later in the week. I was amazed when he responded in an hour. I decided to give Road Trip a try. Well, I’m old and the mind just doesn’t click as well anymore. I ran into trouble trying to import the information from my old program to Road Trip. Again, I sent an email to Darren and got a quick response. He gave me easy but detailed instructions on how to convert the data. I’ll admit that I was even struggling to download my old files. In frustration, I sent a file to Darren and said I couldn’t get it to convert. I think after about 15 minutes, I started to figure it out and was going to email him to say so. But he had already converted it for me and it was sitting in my in box. Bottom line: Fantastic support! I owe him a couple beers! Now that it’s running, even this old man finds it to be a very easy to use program. Thanks again Darren!

UPDATE Aug 2024: Still very pleased with this app and highly recommend. Easy to use and he has a very detailed User Manual and FAQ on his website.

I bought Road Trip on October 9, 2012. Nearly 11 years ago, and I’ve entered nearly every fill-up since, across multiple cars! I realized it’s so ingrained in my habits I neglected to rate and review, sorry for the delay! I also thought maybe I’d be unique in my longevity with the app, but I quickly saw another review from 2009! My purchase (I found my receipt!) was of version 1.8.1, and the App Store only has history listed back to version 11.3 now, 7 years back!

So, this app is awesome. Pretty much works perfectly, calculates all the stats you might want, backs up to Dropbox silently without fuss, is easy to enter data in, has numerous flexible options to customize the availed fields for each car and tracking preferences. Just absolutely amazing. Thanks to everyone else still buying this app because it’s provided a lot of value for the one-time purchase 11 years ago, and still gets regular updates and bug fixes.

Major thanks to Darren for making something so solid and useful! I’m sure he doesn’t even know who I am, as I’ve never needed to contact support or interact to get everything working.

Road Trip is one of the few apps I actually like and use. I don't like to remember or know much at all about my transportation appliances, but I need the info to manage and make decisions about them. Road Trip gathers and presents all that info for me apparently without sniffing my every move, weight gain, utterance, and networks of friends, families, and associates, etc.

I had an idea for the app. I can already see the complexity of implementing it, but figured I'd share anyway. For statistics, you provide a total cost to date summary. I would love to see an inflation adjusted total cost to date summary as well. E.g. I bought a used car in Jan 2015 for $11,500 USD, which now* has an inflation adjusted value of about $13,719 USD. in order to normalize the values before summarizing, the app would have to consider for each entry the purchase date, report date, currency, etc. as well as refer to consumer price indexes such as those behind the US BLS CPI Inflation Calculator.

This would give me a clear understanding of total cost of ownership in today's currency. When looking at that $3000 repair estimate on my current car vs. scrapping it and buying a replacement car, I could then compare costs in an "apples to apples" manner to support my decision.

*or as close to "now" as is possible to estimate based on available reference data, which is plenty close enough.