Thanks to GM’s new app platform, keeping track of family members, as well as learning their driving history, is easier than ever. One hack from our Disrupt NY Hackathon, called Kar Nanny, seeks to let users see where their kids are driving and get notifications if they’re being unsafe. Or you can see where your spouse is. Or, if you own a car rental fleet, this will give you the opportunity to keep tabs on how renters are using your cars.
The app can be installed on the GM infotainment system, but it runs transparently in the background. The real power of Kar Nanny comes from mobile apps that connect with the on-board system to grab info and display it on users’ mobile phones. In addition to real-time location data, it also keeps track of driving history, so you can see how fast your kids were driving or how much gas is left in their tank.
Users can also receive alerts based on user-defined criteria. So, for instance, parents can get texts if they know that their kids were driving over the speed limit. Or they can set a geofence and find out if their kid drives into the city with the family car.
For fleets, the app can provide a history of renters that have driven aggressively. And if there’s ever an accident, the app can help to reconstruct what happened, showing the speed the car was driving at impact or whether there was sudden braking, for instance.
The revenue model is to have a monthly subscription, $5 for every car and driver per month that are monitored. While Kar Nanny will have a freemium model for the first driver in a family situation, the team expects that fleet monitoring is where they’ll actually make their money.
Of course, Kar Nanny used the GM API and app platform to get info related to a user’s driving history. The team used Appery.io to prototype the mobile app and Pusher‘s real-time messaging API to send mobile notifications.
The team is made up of Haris Amin, a software engineer at Dailyburn; Dan Karney, a software engineer by day at the digital audio ad network TargetSpot; Raquel Hernandez, a full-stack software developer who’s working as a senior technologist in an innovation lab making mobile apps for the hospitality industry; and Justin Isaf, former director of community for the Huffington Post.