The first generation of smart car gadgets tracked driving. GOFAR IMPROVES IT! We translate your engine data into a live conversation between you and your car, teaching you how to drive your car at an optimum level.
Combining rocket-tracking computing and a Formula One inspired display, GoFar will change the way you drive.
Every engine speed has a sweet spot – an optimum position that maximises your power and minimises your fuel consumption. It’s where your car runs best.
Driving in the sweet spot saves fuel – which saves money and cuts emissions. Unless you have GoFar (or are part of a Formula 1 race team) it’s very difficult to find.
Meet the GoFar family, from right to left: The Dongle (the brain), RAY (the looks) and the app (an App). Together they will change the way you drive.
We waste a fifth to a quarter of the fuel we pay for because of inefficient driving styles – particularly fast acceleration, harsh braking and stop-start driving (see FAQ for references). Without clear information on your driving efficiency it’s hard to avoid.
GoFar turns your car from a mystery to an open book. Want to see trip times, trip costs, fuel used? No problem. GoFar collects awesome analytical data. Automagically.
We make it easy to run experiments to test different drive routes or work out which fuel type gets you further for less. You get clear actionable insights that make it simple to make informed decisions and drive smarter.
Efficient driving is a win win for your bank account and the environment. Adapting your driving behaviour has the best pay off of anything you can do to reduce emissions (see FAQ for reference). Real time feedback is the best way to improve driving style and that’s exactly what GoFar does, safely and simply. It’s a lot cheaper than buying a cutting edge new car.
Efficient driving is safer than stop start driving. Lower peak speeds and a more attentive, smoother drive style can cut collisions by over 15% (see FAQ for references). GoFar goes further. We provide safe, hands free feedback. Plus we monitor your unique driving behaviour to show you when you’re driving is less alert than normal.
82% of drivers think they are above average! (see FAQ for reference). Now with GoFar, you can prove you’re the best. Compete in leagues for your make and model, challenge friends, or just beat your personal best. Whether you’re optimising for trip time or fuel, GoFar learns your driving style and becomes more sensitive as you improve, making sure you always improve.
We’ve put a lot of thought into the design. After exploring over 200 shapes and sizes, we’ve settled into a sleek, slim silhouette that fits seamlessly into any car. It works in your peripheral vision, so it can communicate with you clearly without distracting you from the road.
Installation is easy once you’ve found your car’s OBD port (like a big USB port in your car). Check your manual or google to track it down if you don’t immediately see it. See below for more on compatibility.
Energy Tracking
Our patented energy tracking is a world first and is part of what allows us to dig deep into your vehicle’s dynamics and understand things such as where the sweet spot is.
Why is this awesome?
Emissions Tracking
GoFar’s emissions tracking tech measures carbon emissions accurately as you drive. We do this by monitoring gasoline flow rate and combustion conditions and calculating out the resulting emissions flow rates. We think that accurately measuring and displaying emissions will help to motivate more people toward offsetting and this would be a big win for us all.
Many older cars will still work with GoFar, as long as they are “OBDII Compliant”. If you can’t find your car on the list, check your manual, google it, ask us a question on Kickstarter or email us at hello@gofar.co.
iOS devices supported at launch in November
Android support to come in December
The Android ecosystem is so diverse and we need a little more time to get the app ready – we hope you understand. We plan to support Android devices with hardware Bluetooth low energy support and running Android OS v4.3 or newer.
Some popular devices that support Bluetooth low energy:
GoFar started in Sydney, Australia and has recently opened in the USA but the team comes from every corner of the world including India, UK, China, Israel, Sweden, Portugal, Russia and of course USA and Australia.
We have worked at 3M, Nestle and IBM and amongst the team we have an aerospace engineer who was selected as one of two Australians to attend NASA space camp, a genius who got the second highest score in India’s national Maths Olympiad, an Oxford graduate, a budding lawyer who came in the top 0.01% in the country and a design guru who also has a 1st in Mechatronic Engineering.
We’ve also teamed up with cocreators – the industrial design team behind Microview – an already successfully delivered Kickstarter project.
GoFar was created to get smarter driving into your hands at an affordable price. While we’ve been bootstrapping for the past two years to keep costs down, to get GoFar into full production we need your help. Quality tooling is expensive and minimum order quantities are required to secure the best component pricing.
More importantly, GoFar will be better if the development is strongly driven by customers. Kickstarter provides a great opportunity to build a community of customers at the heart of our product, to ensure we build what drivers want.
Check out our website and follow us on Facebook and Twitter
For a more gritty, film noir flavour, check out our single shot demos showing GoFar in action and enjoy founder Danny, demoing the product after 3 hours sleep.
Kickstarter projects are ambitious and so delay is the most obvious risk. We’re building firmware, apps and hardware and pushing the envelope on the hardware and the firmware algorithms. That said we’ve got a strong team and we’ve been working hard on this for multiple man years. We’ve also put some flex in the schedule – we’ve been backers ourselves so it seemed sensible.
We have extensive expertise from highly experienced manufacturing, industrial design and electrical engineering professionals.
In particular, Ted and Braden at cocreators.com.au, our Sydney based industrial designers were the design team behind MicroView – a successfully delivered Kickstarter project with thousands of backers. They have real project experience setting up manufacturing in China and Taiwan. If you ever need a set of awesomely creative industrial designers who also know how products get built then they are absolute guns.
Scott McDaid – experienced electrical engineer who’s designed over 100 PCBs that have gone into production in millions of devices has been working closely with Danny on the boards. As a rule our boards have required little or no modifications so the quality control process in the design phase has been very strong.
Richard Bennett – a global logistics whizz, has been advising us on shipping.
We’re minimising the challenge of delivering a bug free app by working on native versions and starting early with the functional shells already for iOS. Android is a priority for us but to ensure we deliver something of the right standard we’ve taken the decision to focus on the core set of functionalities in iOS initially. Our cloud back end is set up and we are expanding the architecture to handle a wide range of future use cases.
As an in-car wireless device we have to take safety very seriously, and GoFar needs to progress through FCC and CE compliance and regulatory tests. We’ve already designed with pre-complied components largely and are working closely with the relevant test bodies.
Above all we’ll make sure we keep you well informed, as lack of communication is the thing that’s most annoyed us when we’ve supported projects.