GoKawiilTL;DR: I made an app to share a car with my family using flutter. It was a very interesting experience.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
We were sitting around the kitchen table trying to make a plan for splitting the gas bill. This was an ongoing problem, and me joining the family had only made it worse. There needed to be a way to determine who needed to pay for filling the car, because otherwise, whoever got it when the tank was empty got left with the bill, and that was just plain unfair. To be clear, we all tried to make sure to fill up when we used a significant amount of fuel. But if you drive the car to the store and back, it doesn’t use a lot of gas, and you don’t feel like it needs a fill, but eventually the tank is empty. It’s a death by a thousand cuts.
The first suggestion thrown around was from my sister-in-law. One would refill however many kilometers you drove. One of the views on the car’s display says how many Km are remaining until the tank is empty, which is based on the average efficiency of the current trip. The obvious difficulty with using this information, is that you can’t go the gas station and ask them to fill up 100Km of petrol in your tank, you can only ask for liters, so that plan was a bit problematic.
I then realized that you could take the trip odometer reading combined with the trip efficiency reading to calculate exactly how much gas was used on that trip. However, no one else was quite as excited at the prospect of doing that math every time, so a different solution was needed. We settled on everyone filling up the car each time they used it, which —while it kinda worked— was just very annoying if you just took the car for a small errand.
I’d been itching to build an app for a while, and just needed the right idea to get on it. Suddenly, here is a problem waiting to be solved, on a silver platter! There were other issues we were having with sharing the car: finding out who had it; where they parked; scheduling conflicts; so the empty gas tank was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I figured I could put together something that could solve most of the issues we faced without adding friction, and began immediately working on a prototype.
The Birth of a Product
I defined the scope for this project as “An app that’s better for sharing a car than a WhatsApp group”. This meant it needed to be able to:
Know the car’s location (only when it was available, it was no one else’s business where I took it).
Know the status of the car, so we could know who had it and when (very helpful when chasing down tickets).
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