Porsche NEXT OI Competition: DRIVING
We’re now a few weeks in to the Porsche NEXT OI Competition 2019 and, following on from last week’s post about the HOME scenario, today’s post will be focusing on the second scenario: DRIVING.
These posts are designed to give you a quick rundown of each theme, guide your development and offer some inspiration for you and your team when thinking about applications to build for connected Porsche sports cars. We will also try to recommend APIs that would work well with the suggested application ideas, so you’ll have a good idea of which APIs you’ll need when building your app or service.
DRIVING
The second theme of the competition is Driving: the main feature of pretty much every car!
For this year’s competition, we’d like teams to think of an innovative and experience-enhancing app related to driving itself. Whatever your idea may be, it should aim to solve a problem that is directly related to driving the vehicle.
When it comes to concepting and building useful apps for drivers and car owners on-the-go, there are a host of different directions you could choose to take: weather reporting, route suggestions, engine monitoring and accident prevention to name just a few.
We’re sure you’ve got plenty of your own ideas, but in case you’re still undecided, or unsure which APIs you need, here are some of our driving app ideas as well as a look at the all-important APIs you could use to build them.
Ridesharing
Ridesharing is becoming an increasingly popular choice for car owners and travellers these days and an innovative, user-focused ridesharing app that offers a twist on the current array of options could be the perfect app for teams thinking about the DRIVING scenario.
The ease of use of ridesharing, not to mention its very low cost, has been largely responsible for its market success, with Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar considered to be the best ridesharing companies in the transportation industry.
APIWhat could your app offer that these leading players don’t? How would your offering stand out from the crowd? However you choose to tackle the ridesharing industry here are some of the APIs you may very well need to do it.
Vehicle Location API
The Vehicle Location API lets you know the exact location of the car. With access to this data your app could then potentially calculate the distance between the car and the customer, the amount of time it would take to collect the customer, and if there are other potential customers, hazards or issues in the vicinity.
Diagnostics API
The Diagnostics API has numerous properties including Engine Oil Temperature, Speed, Engine RPM and many, many more. But the property of the Diagnostics API that we’ll be looking at specifically for a ridesharing app is Mileage.
Measuring and recording the mileage is essential for any ridesharing application in order for the driver and passenger to know the number of kilometres covered during the journey. Similar to an old-school taxi meter, the Mileage property of the Diagnostics API could then inform the end price for the customer, as well as indicate to the driver if refuelling is necessary.
Navi Destination API
The Navi Destination API identifies the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of the specific place or places the user wants to go to in their ridesharing journey. Sent from the user’s smartphone to the vehicle, the command ‘Set Navi Destination’ sets the navigation destination and is forwarded to the navigation system of the car.
Other useful APIs for the DRIVING scenario:
Odometer API
An odometer is used to measure the distance that a vehicle has travelled — useful for the everyday driver who wishes to know how much ground he or she is covering, or a car rental company who wants to track average distances travelled by their customers. Within a fleet management company for example, this information would be useful on the side of the operators for calculating and budgeting for average fuel costs and booking routine vehicle maintenance. If a vehicle is regularly travelling extremely long distances it will need to have more regular safety checks than a vehicle which only travels short distances. On the side of the driver it would be useful for proving distance covered when working shifts as well as to provide supporting evidence (if needed) of the number of hours worked or locations visited.
Fuel Level API
The Fuel Level API is able to tell the driver what the level of the fuel is at any given time. Again this is useful for budgeting fuel costs, scheduling vehicle refuelling and keeping an eye on emissions. It could also be used to see if a vehicle is not using its fuel efficiently or if further efficiencies could be made.
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We hope you’ve found this short rundown of ideas and APIs for the Porsche NEXT OI Competition useful for your own brainstorming, testing and building. Next time we’ll be looking at some application ideas and APIs which complement the ARRIVAL theme but, until then, best of luck with your projects for the competition; we can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with!
