My daughter Littlest R recently misplaced her car; she had parked a couple blocks from her usual location, and the next morning when her car wasn’t in its accustomed spot, panic ensued.
Mrs. R is wondering whether there exists some kind of car tracker, where you could call up an app on your phone and get a map of where your car is.
Any of you have any experience with that kind of device? Mrs. R thinks that something that connected to your car’s battery would be better than a unit which had its own battery.
If it’s a newer car and has OnStar or the other maker’s equivalent, she could subscribe to that. (might even be a Christmas/Birthday present for her). I have an app on my phone that allows me to see where my truck is parked. It does other things as well, but the parked location has come in handy a couple of times when I’m in the city and all the parking garages look the same.
Google’s Find My Device is more optimized for this purpose. It’ll tell you exactly where your Android phone is now, or was last seen. And allow you to play a sound on it, or lock or erase it remotely.
I’ve used Apple’s iPhone finder to locate my phone inside our home by playing a tune. My hearing sucks, so I had my gf help me. It was in my bathrobe pocket, hanging in my closet.
A friend couldn’t find his car in a huge airport parking lot. Turns out they do a constant census of the lot. He gave his plate number to a guy who then drove him right to his vehicle!
Your phone collects and astonishing amount of data which Google can work with. I don’t know how Google does it either but:
The phone’s accelerometer data can likely indicate the difference between accelerating/decelerating in a car versus getting out of the car and walking away. Google could flag the location at those changes in mode of transportation as a parking spot.
Google has mapped where the traffic lights and stop signs are in cities so it can tell whether a traffic stop is at a light/sign or somewhere else.
If you used Google maps to navigate, it can guess that your parking spot is somewhere near your destination and look for the most likely place on your timeline that equaled “parked here.”
Google has data from millions of other drivers so if your car is the only one stopping, Google knows you are parked rather stuck in traffic.
Google has map data showing where the parking lots are. If a car stops in one, safe bet is that it’s parked.
Front-facing cameras are constantly looking around. Google might be able to infer from its data whether the phone was inside a car and is now outside, indicating that the car has parked (although this seems like an unlikely way to do it).
If the phone is paired with the car’s bluetooth, the phone will definitely know when they have disconnected, which implies parking spot.
The way people interact with their phone might differ in discernable ways when they are driving versus when they are walking. Google might pick up on that to flag driving versus walking.
These methods use a bunch of different phone sensors (GPS, wifi, bluetooth, camera, accelerometer, and touch screen). I’ll bet a good engineer could figure out how to use this data to devise a dozen other ways to determine when a phone left a parked car. One of those might even be the way Google actually does it.
The first time I was made aware of Google’s ability to remember where I’d parked, I owned a Samsung Galaxy phone. We drove to Pittsburgh’s SouthSide to attend a concert at the Rex Theater. It took a while, but I found a parking spot on a fairly distant side street. We hurried to the Rex and had a wonderful evening.
After the show, we began walking in the general direction where I thought the car might be. Neither of us knew exactly where I’d parked. We were getting nervous, then my phone chimed. Google wanted to know if I needed help finding my car. Hell ya, Google!! My phone led my right to it.
Define malware. I have come to expect free apps that are useful to contain ads. If the app works well, but pushes ads, I’ll happily pay a few bucks to get rid of the ads.
I just tried it now and it put me in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with “no history found” for yesterday. Annoyed, I dug a little deeper and found you have to read some warnings then activate it first.
Timeline works best when GPS is enabled (which is a bit of a battery drain), otherwise the locations can be somewhat approximate. Accessing Google Maps briefly when you park should be enough to ensure a good location fix.
