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GOFAR - Economical Driving Analyser & on Board Diagnostic Reader $109 Shipped, Was $159. [Sydney]

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Found a Facebook ad some people might be intrigued by this. They offer a guarantee and 100% money back if you honestly don't like it. This was a Kickstarter campaign.

GOFAR analyses the data provided by your car's ECU and helps you make minute changes to the way you drive with simple real time feedback. If GOFAR is blue, you're good - when it starts to glow red, you're burning more fuel (and money) than is optimal.

It also pairs with your smartphone via an app to track everything from the fuel you burn to money spent and you can even workout when the best time to leave your home is.

This device connects to your OBD ( On-Board Diagnostic / OBD-II ) which is in most cars from 2006 onwards and will tell you what your engine light error means.

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  • +5

    Wow thats one hell of a markup. You can get almost the same thing on eBay for $10. Your paying over $100 for that blue/red led.

    • Can you point me in the right direction on what to look for on ebay … ?
      The blue/red led should be pretty helpful as you can adjust your driving style straight away (I guess the 10$ item would track the fuel consumption/efficiency but does not give you instant feedback?)

      • +2

        You would get something like this off eBay, then use the free Torque app on your phone to connect your phone with your car.
        http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Mini-Wireless-Auto-Diagnostic-Sca…

        https://torque-bhp.com/wiki/Main_Page

        That would give you a realtime display on your phone, you could monitor something like fuel consumption and %load to give you an idea of how efficiently you were driving.

        • Better find, I guess the hype train of Kickstarter is keeping this device alive.

        • Thanks a lot stumo.

          Looks like a lot of these phone apps combined with a cheap OBD II Transmitter can do a similar thing. The only benefit I see is that the device can be neatly installed and sits there all the time to remind you to drive fuel efficient. No need to put up your phone and have it as simple as possible. But that is about it. The ebay + app version is definitely much cheaper and will do the trick … :-)

          Thanks a lot!

        • @mini_wombat: Another positive vote for torque + OBD. I have the pro version and it logs all of my trips and uploads them to Google drive, making it heaps easier to track my kms during tax time.

        • @stumo have you used the gofar app? Seems they are vastly different?

      • Avoid braking. That's basically what all economy driving style boils down to.

        How is a red light supposed to help you anyway? May as well have a sign in the passenger seat "You are a bad driver"

      • Any ODB-II bluetooth adapter will do what this item claims. If you want live feedback just leave your phone with the screen on and you can get the same feedback.

        It's a bad idea to leave one of these plugged in for a length of time though, it can be subject to bluetooth hijacks and is a big security risk.

        • You can get live feedback from a low cost dongle and that's definitely worth considering.

          But you have to start and stop it every trip.
          And it won't store your trips.
          And you can't use Google maps or Waze whilst you're driving and still capture the data for later analysis.
          The low cost adaptors are fine and worth considering. Many of our customers started with them. We're doing rather more (and adding every new features every month).

        • Excellent point on security!
          We're pin protected and locked to your phone with all data transmission encrypted. We take security very seriously.

    • From my understanding, the gofar device runs your driving style through some algorithms in the cloud to provide long-term analysis.

      Hooking up a odb2 reader to your phone to display gauges is somewhat different.

      • Yeah lol The "algorithms" are probably just working out when to change the LED colour based on %load for that particular model of car.

        • Well, it's supposed to do more than that. The gofar dongle is full of motion sensors:

          6 axis motion sensors: 3 accelerometers and 3 gyroscopes allow GOFAR to precisely track your car's motion in 3 dimensions - central to our energy tracking tech.

          which go into their 'Our patented energy tracking is a world first and is part of what allows us to dig deep into your vehicle’s dynamics and understand things such as where the sweet spot is.'

          I'm not saying it works as described, nor worth the money, but it is more complicated than just reading instantaneous values from the OBD port.

        • @damion: I use Bluetooth OBDII value outputs on my race car, and this just look like one of them but has a little more memory and some ability to track data over time rather than just output instantaneous sensor outputs.

          This tracking could be done wholly within an app connected to the reader. So as to it being an amazing driving aid is a little thin at best. I think I would still get a $10 ELM adapter from eBay…

        • @damion: Yes. My lack of hair confirms that it is indeed rather more complicated than reading instantaneous values.

  • +1

    Is that USD or AUD?

    • AUD

  • +1

    Facebook ad

    previous "deals" which people thought were good, ended up being a waste of money, i would place this in the same basket.

    NO DEAL HERE.

  • Does it work for Tesla cars?

    • Does it come with OBDII port? No reason why it wouldn't work. Energy is stored in batteries instead of a fuel tank. Engine is replaced with electric motor. There is no reason that a Tesla couldn't be hooked up to OBDII type system if it's supported…

      • Teslas have OBD ports but electric cars don't appear to conform to same emissions requirements so it's non-trivial to get an OBDII adapter working in one.

  • +2

    Anyone else old enough to remember vacuum gauges in cars - like a tacho that 'moved' the other way?

  • +3

    $99 including shipping from sparesbox https://www.sparesbox.com.au/gofar-dongle

  • Ian from GOFAR here. I'll try and respond to all comments one at a time. I'll check in later in case more questions appear.

    • GOFAR works on petrol, diesel and hybrid. We're working on LPG.
    • GOFAR does not support Electric at the moment so no Teslas I'm afraid. We were described as "a poor man's Tesla" by Forbes. Hmm.
    We find our customers like GOFAR for different reasons
    • Some have used cheap dongles that require you to have the app open all the time and find they want a more convenient solution that logs driving in the background (so they can use Google maps for example).
    • Some like that GOFAR has memory and reliably tracks all their driving even if they forget their phone or it dies. Cheap dongles do not. No connection, no data, no history.
    • Some like that we store trip summaries in the cloud so you can email work trips to your accountant. Cheap dongles do not do this and you don't need to miss many trips at 0.66c/km for GOFAR to make good sense.
    • Some want to spend less on fuel. These customers drive a lot and like that we've built (a Good Design Award winning) device that has been proven in 4 trials to cut fuel use by 14.7% on average. Less for some, more for others of course. I'm running a Sydney based trial at the moment - email [email protected] if you want to join. We are a very data driven company. We cut harsh braking by 21% too - that's got to be a good thing! Top tip - be careful on Fridays..

    I really appreciate all the comments. We're always looking for new features to add - keep them coming.
    One thing on our backlog is speed alerts and speed cam alerts. Useful?

  • And another thing! (Engineers who've worked on this for 3 years, felt I'd missed some points!)

    • Some like that our small form factor dongle can be left in the car without stressing about killing the battery.
    • Some like that we alert them if we detect an error code on the car (and we translate 3,000 of these to plain english).
    • Some like that we can provide no hassle servicing (just launched) with $50 off your first service (a partnership with awesome mobile mechanics like Sparesbox).
    • Some like that we release new features every month. Cheap dongles cannot be updated. We released a driver league last month that allows you to compete with your friends (or P plater children).

    What do you want us to add in next? People keep on asking but we can't detect and blow up speed cameras.

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