For clarity, I wasn't suggesting to use OBD monitors and pulling data, it's literally just a self reporting guesstimate of whatever. I.e., I drove from DV to San Diego, I drove XXXX miles, I stopped at 123 Walmart st., it was roughly 65° and sunny. It wouldn't be anything that would require pulling anything just remembering and typing it in so that if someone is looking for info on a road trip and someone has done it there's something there to review.
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I've done similar things like this too, and do it a lot for work. I work in research and at times have to do a lot of manual data entry with a ton of data elements. At the end of the day it would just end up being however much someone wants to put into it and would serve as a reference to help people plan a longer trip the first time around. If someone's already entered a trip, i.e., Durham to Fairfax in my case, I don't think someone would need to re-enter the info, someone could just add to it if they wanted.Sounds like a great idea... but... but... but...
The manual data entry overhead is much, much more daunting than you realize. I've done this very thing with several of my vehicles, mostly by keeping gas receipts and batching entries to a spreadsheet, with notations for exception conditions like very cold weather and so on. The amount of time this takes is huge.
I was doing this to track efficiency and cost of operation. What I discovered is that nearly everything I needed to know was documented in the first 10K of ownership, anything further was simply confirming the trend to two decimal places. The most eye-opening use of the information in one case was discovering that with two otherwise identical cars, one a MT, the other a hybrid, cost of operation of the hybrid was higher. Ain't that a kick in the head?
Anyway, there are a boatload of phone apps that do this for you, mostly for business expense documentation. Just find one that hits most of the points you need and tweak with manual notes whenever needed.
I've done a lot of traveling up/down I-95 because my Spouse has been up in Fairfax finishing a clinical (we live in Durham NC) and am very familiar with that route, where to stop, the road/weather conditions I've driven in etc. I am going to create a Google doc spreadsheet to test it out and post it and keep track of how long it takes to enter it. Anyone would be able to enter as much or as little as they want. The info like weather, traffic, road conditions, speed, elevation that's kinda the icing on the cake.
You are correct, there are a ton of apps, but that would only be useful to me. Whereas what I am suggesting, if I wanted to plan a trip from Durham to Boston, if someone's done it and entered some info, I could just quickly use that as a reference. For me personally, just having an anecdote from someone who's driven a specific route would be helpful to reduce things like range anxiety and worrying about if I will make it somewhere, the best place to stop etc.
Unrelated. Thats really bizarre to hear about operating costs of a hybrid relative to the MT. Any idea what made it higher?
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