You probably don’t think of your car as a developer platform, but Mike Rosack did. A few days after buying his Chevy Volt, Rosack started slowly mining his driving data. But he eventually revved up his efforts and created a community platform for drivers to track their own efficiency. Today more than 1,800 Volt owners compare stats with each other, jockeying for position on Rosack’s Volt Stats leader board.
The Volt is, in many ways, a natural fit for hacker car enthusiasts. GM already heavily “gamifies” the Volt with its Driver Information Center, a dashboard display providing immediate visual feedback on how efficiently the car is being driven. The car is also heavily instrumented for OnStar, which gives drivers access to performance information and other data through its RemoteLink mobile app for iOS and Android.
Rosack initially wanted to do more with his own driving data than just view it on his phone. So he built what eventually became Volt Stats to capture this data, then started sharing it with other Volt owners. There was just one small problem: Volt Stats relied on Rosack’s reverse engineering of an interface for OnStar’s RemoteLink mobile application (iOS and Android). When OnStar moved to shut down the Web services interface Rosack had plugged into in mid-October, Volt Stats arrived at a screeching halt.
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