Service Beacon car maintenance schedule reminders |
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...Do you have a hard time keeping track of when your next vehicle maintenance is required? Service Beacon is there to help keep up with the maintenance on your vehicle. Hat tip to Dumb Little Man where I first saw Service Beacon mentioned. Some of the registration information seemed extraneous and made me wonder if region-based ad targeting is going to be following. Why does Service Beacon require my First and Last name, for example?
After registering and clicking on a validation link, the next step is adding your car. I added our 2007 PT Cruiser first. The system dropdown menus offered me the option to choose “model not here” but it had all the right information for our car.
Step two is finding your local dealer which in the case for both cars they didn’t have the local Puyallup Chrysler or Puyallup Saturn dealerships in their database. I was able to add the dealer and city name on the “unknown dealership” form.
After adding the car and the mileage, a screen on Service Beacon is returned telling you what the next maintenance — or current maintenance — will be required for your car. You can create a record of your maintenance trips, but a glaring omission seemed to be any sort of export function? Is it possible to get this information — besides printing the screens — back out of Service Beacon? If not, please add this feature.
Within an hour of registration — and this is the part that makes me nervous about the service — I received two separate emails from Service Beacon. Why couldn’t they put both notices in one email? It’s not like our email boxes are crowded enough already. One of the emails is shown below.
Coincidentally, yesterday we received a snail mail reminder from the Chrysler dealer that it’s time for our next oil change, but we were just there a month ago and the sticker in the window says we don’t need to come back until 6,000 miles or 12/18, whichever comes first. Service Beacon shows the next service date as December 4. I realize these are estimates, but you don’t want to over-service your vehicle. Once every three months / 3,000 miles should be more than sufficient for lube, oil and filter changes.
The Saturn dealership hasn’t been very good about notifying us about maintenance windows with our 2005 Saturn Relay and this coming weekend we’re taking it in because the check engine light has come on (we haven’t driven it since this happened). At 41,000 miles, we’re hoping it’s something very minor. One of the services I miss when we dropped Onstar was the monthly email diagnostics for our Relay. That might have shed some more light on the problem than the light.
Why don’t we have more intelligent check engine light notifications?
I’m sure luxury cars are better about this then lower end cars, but our Saturn Relay cost over $25,000 which isn’t exactly cheap. Today’s car technology should be able to offer a human readable message about what’s wrong with the car. Sensor out of place? We’ve maintained the car properly, taking it in for the regular oil changes and tune-ups.
Keep reading, there is a technology solution and it costs less than $200 to implement. It’s too bad if this technology is available that it’s not a standard feature on every new car. Imagine if you could take the information in your car and stream the data to your computer via WiFi while it’s parked in the driveway.
CarChip Pro
While I’m not aware of there being a WiFi option, there is a USB one called CarChip. I remember seeing the Carchip Pro at one of the retail stores that would report back information in most newer model cars:
Just plug CarChip into the OBDII port (easily found under the dashboard or steering wheel) and you’re ready to roll. Once installed, CarChip reads and stores data from your car’s on-board computers, continuously logging driving and engine performance.
Does either of our newer cars have an OBDIII port? According to this tool, both our vehicles have OBDIII ports, but darned if I can find them. I’m going to check with the dealer at the next service and ask them to show me where the port is located. If we do have one, then we need to buy one of these CarChips and try it out. They are available at Amazon.
Imagine how much more useful a service like Service Beacon could be in helping you manage your car data on your desktop than something web-based if they had the data from one of these chips. As Service Beacon is, it’s more or less an email reminder service with a database of the maintenance schedules for various models. If you don’t want to read through the owner’s manual and create your own email service reminders, it could be useful.
Me? I want more. I’m going to explore this CarChip option further. Will get back when I learn more. If anybody reading is already using the CarChip, please share your experience below.
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Hi TDavid,
Thanks so much for the post! I hope it’s okay if I answer some of your questions and explain our thinking behind why we did what we did.
Your question: Why do we ask for your name and location (country, zip/postal code)?
Answer: You can actually fill in anything you want, noone is going to validate it on our end. The value on the other hand of filling in the correct info is because the system will work a little bit better if you do fill it in correctly. Your name will get stored for future use so that when you create a service order, the fields get filled in automatically rather than you having to type them in. However, if you are nervous about giving your real name and you fill in John Doe, you can always override it when you create your order. The same is true for any address info you want to fill in - we actually provide the ability to fill in your full address in the My Info area of the application. But you dont have to — it is purely to make it easier for users who want to store the info. In addition, providing your correct zip/postal code on signup will help the system try and find the correct dealership in our system and bring them up when you create your car. I know we didnt have your dealers so it was sort of a waste, but for a lot of users, they did find their dealer and get to select it automatically. I’d add that if you gave us a “fake” zip code, we have a way for you to override the fake zip code and put in a real one when you create your car. Our thought there wasn’t actually for people faking their address - it was for people who, for example, own a car at another home (e.g. if you live in Washington but during the winter you live in Arizona and leave a car there). You could store the info for your Arizona car in the same account and the custom zip/postal code option was to address finding a dealership there. We also thought it might be useful for parents who give their kids a car for school in another State - that way the parents can stay on top of the servicing even if their kids are driving it. BTW - that is what the secondary email address option is for — two people can get notified on the service of one car, the owner and separately, the driver.
Re an export function: It’s on our list of to do’s. That list is super long and has gotten even longer since we got Lifehacker and DumbLittleMan traffic because our users are pretty smart and have emailed a ton of ideas. We will eventually get to it though.
Re separate emails for each car: Intentional and for numerous reasons. A starter is we dont limit how many cars you can add - if a fleet manager puts in 1000 cars, the email that would get generated would be massive. A way to avoid one email from crashing us was to break up the emails by having one email per car. Another reason is we plan to offer an option of customizing when you want to get the email and we thought some people might want a different reminder date for different cars. Anyhow, we just thought this would be more flexible for everyone.
Overall: The service is partly a reminder service as you said. But for a lot of people it is going to provide way more. The benefits, if used correctly, include:
1. Keeping your car maintenance log in one place, regardless of where you serviced the car (dealer, local garage, yourself)
2. Getting notified of recalls should they be issued
3. Help people not get completely ripped off by a garage that tells you you need something as mundane as oil flush when you really dont need one for another hundred thousand miles.
4. It will, on the other hand, tell people when they need to do a tire rotation, even when jiffy lube doesnt bother to mention it and doesnt care if your tires wear out on one side as a result. Would you believe that there are people who dont even realize it might be good to change their oil every once and a while? This will help.
5. It should hopefully help you show a prospective buyer what service you did when you go to sell your car. This likely means a higher sales price which means not only is ServiceBeacon free to use, it may actually pay you to use it. We think that is kind of cool. You can also, as an added benefit to the new owner, transfer the entire service history of your car to them by transferring the control of the car to them within the system (a feature in Manage my Cars).
6. Eventually, as we build out the system, will allow you to benefit from deals and offers from partners as well as participating dealers. This isnt going to be a way of spamming you either - the deals will be integrated into the system as menu items you can ignore if you dont care about the deals. You wont be getting extra emails (as you, and most people including us), dont appreciate or need to receive.
I hope this helps clarify things. We really appreciate the feedback. If you think of anything else or have other ideas, suggestions, comments, etc… definitely let us know - we have responded individually to every person who took the time to contact us using our contact form so that would be the easiest way if you do think of other things we should be doing.
Thanks! Josh @ ServiceBeacon
Comment by Josh — November 8, 2007 @ 3:59 pm PST
Wow Josh, thank you very much for the extremely detailed feedback. Most helpful.
Comment by TDavid — November 8, 2007 @ 4:56 pm PST
Hi TDavid,
You are most welcome
Thanks again for the review — we are trying to read everyones blog posts to gather feedback and answer any questions and yours was especially interesting and detailed.
Josh
Comment by Josh — November 8, 2007 @ 7:34 pm PST
Did you look for OBD connector in the fuse compartment.
Even cheaper that the CarChip would be to simply buy a code reader for $50 and up; plug it in when the engine icon lights orange. After all your warning will not be lighting up periodically. If it did, sell that lemon! Besides you can use it in more than one car.
Comment by A Brinck — November 9, 2007 @ 3:57 am PST
Nope, A Brinck, don’t even know what an OBD connector looks like. Will have to Google that, thanks for the tip.
Comment by TDavid — November 9, 2007 @ 8:47 am PST