Saving Gas with the iPhone Gets a Bit More Sophisticated

by Benjamin Jones on September 23, 2008

In the beginning, there were iPhone apps that could do things like assist you in recording how much gas you used. Some of them even made pretty graphs, taking them a little bit beyond your average notebook in terms of usefulness. This pretty graphs were definitely useful, which is why ecomodder has employed them for so long in our own fuel economy garage. However, I knew there would come a day when the iPhone rivaled even the best fuel economy gauges for usefulness.

Enter greenMeter

The iPhone and iPod Touch both come with accelerometers that help them perform various tasks, and have thus far created a large amount of interesting and fun games that get you flailing your arms around like a lunatic. It was only a matter of time until someone put that useful feature to work for an automotive application. The app that born out of this technology was greenMeter, which helps drivers hone in their ecodriving skills by getting feedback on their habits.

GreenMeter will cost you $5.99, but you get a lot for those six smackers. The app takes into account things like drag coefficient, frontal area, temperature, wind, barometric pressure, and anything else that might affect your fuel economy. The only thing that it doesn’t seem to do is directly measure your fuel economy (serious bummer).

If you already have an iPhone or iPod Touch, this might be worth it to pick up. My only word of caution is that things like this are rarely correct in every situation, so this is more of an additional to fuel economy instrumentation, and not a replacement for it. Plus, if you don’t like looking up tons of stats, it might be just a bit intimidating!

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