Monday, March 8, 2010

Lost your car when you parked?

I don't mean to sound mean, but I had no idea there was even a market for this. Eddie Kim created a dead simple Android app for locating your car. Not when it's stolen mind you - simply for when you forgot where you parked. When you park, you tell the app to remember the current GPS location, then it can guide you back there later on.
I'm baffled by this though. Surely if people can't remember where they parked, then how are they going to remember to tell the app where they parked in the first place? I can drop my car in an airport long-term parking lot (you know the type - miles of asphalt with tens of thousands of cars in it) and walk straight back to it a month later. It's not difficult.
Fair play to Mr Kim for making money off his app - that's a great success story - but equally it's a terrible indictment of the human condition that there's even a need for this app. I suppose it goes hand-in-hand with the general malaise that surrounds driving nowadays. People treat driving as right instead of a privilege so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that they forget where they parked their cars.

Android Car Locator app.

3 comments:

Silas Humphreys said...

Lately, I've been having that problem if I'm approaching my car from the front, but that's because its visual distinctiveness (the gap in the grille that's been there since I bought it) has finally gone away because I fitted a new grille. Apart from that, I never lose it - and GPS is hardly a good solution!

Toby said...

I can't imagine that GPS would work very well in multi storey car parks anyway.

Silas Humphreys said...

GPS does do approximate altitude readouts, but the trouble is the difficulty of getting satellite signals through the multiple layers of reinforced concrete. I know from experience that a typical British roof of wooden trusses and tiles can block the signals...