First, I just wanted to thank this forum for leading me toward a 2016 Spark EV lease in California. I got it for $600 down (lease broker’s fee, very reasonable IMO and they delivered the car to my door) at $143/mo after taxes for 15,000 mi/year (I drive 25 miles each way for work on weekdays). Anyway, in order to keep an eye on my lease mileage since this was my first lease ever, I looked for a few apps in the app store and also some web-based apps too. They seemed too complicated.
All I wanted to know was: “what should my odometer say today?”. Then I can look at my odometer and know if I’m over or under.
So I wrote a little text messaging bot for myself. I was able to connect it to text messages and facebook messenger. I figured I should share with the rest of this forum since you guys got me such a great deal to begin with. Here’s how you use it:
Just send a text message to 206-203-1985 with “hello” and my text bot will ask you the appropriate questions like car make, model, year, lease start, terms, annual miles. It will remember your settings so you don’t have to enter them again.
I made it available as a Facebook Messenger bot, just search Messenger for “MileTxt” and send it “hello” and it works the same as txt.
I’m on the trial account for twilio’s text messaging service. I might just forget the text message idea and only go with the facebook messenger bot if twilio ends up being too expensive to pay for service.
Anyway, hope you guys would try it out and let me know if you’d like more features like over-mile cost estimates or other types of calculations useful for car leases.
Hi, Thanks for the welcome! I’m a web developer and have never developed any apps. The chat bot was ideal for me because I didn’t have to make a UI when all I need out of it was to get today’s mileage.
What other features could I add? Ask for your current odometer reading and then I could return … Overage cost per mile? Your average miles per day? What about adding multiple cars?
Hi, no offense taken! You are right that is a lot of data to cough up. I suppose asking the car model is unnecessary if you only care about one car, but it’s nice feedback to know your info is saved.
At least I argue that you only have to cough it up once, and then it remembers it for you all the 3 years you have your leased car. Every time afterwards when you want to get a gauge of how you’re doing on your lease mileage, you just ask it “status” instead of having to remember when your lease began, how many miles were on it when you picked it up, what day is it today? etc.
What if I scheduled a weekly auto-text so you wouldn’t have to even ask it? Every Wednesday it would just say, “Today is Wednesday March 15, 2017 and your odometer should read no more than 11097 miles”
I have two cars that are leased so in my case asking the car model is necessary and helpful. It would be nice if you could ask either daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
Devil’s Advocate but imagine someone to get a hold of the database that all that information was stored on. It would be very easy for them to send solicitations that would be relevant to your financial situation leased terms and Lease expiration. I know people sound crazy sometimes when they talk about privacy but I also don’t think people fully realize the risk of putting so much information online in a consolidated location
This is what I was thinking: you don’t need daily updates. Weekly, starting Monday (work week) and showing +/- miles for that week to keep at limit.
Monday’s probably a good idea, after a weekend of unpredictable driving (workdays are pretty predictable) it would be nice to have the workweek’s outlook. I guess this implies that I need to ask for your odometer reading on Mondays. I hate typing in mileage on my phone though.
