While fuel costs might not be your primary concern as a Jeep owner, yep, we’re talking to you with the 40” mud-terrain tires and 8” suspension lift, these fuel focused apps offer more than just tools for figuring out how to find cheap gas for your Jeep and saving you a few bucks (or a few hundred over the course of a year). Helping you find the perfect pit stop, keeping record of scheduled maintenance and vehicle expenses, calculating trip costs and creating maintenance reminders are just a few of the cool extra features these popular Google Play Store apps have to offer.
GasBuddy
This Google Play Store Editor’s Choice app wants to help you find cheap gas and the perfect pit stop. GasBuddy’s search engine helps you find the lowest priced fuel and filter the search results by price, location, brand, and amenities like car washes, restaurants and restrooms. The app works on crowdsourced data and allows users to report gas prices to help the community save money. And with over 50 million downloads, the community has some serious international coverage in the US, Canada and Australia.
But it’s not just about prices, users can also rate stations and read and write reviews about other aspects of the station, which can be very useful if you are trying to find a quick bite or a respectable (read: clean) restroom. If you decide to use the Pay with GasBuddy feature of the app you will save 5c/gal on every fill up. GasBuddy also holds a daily drawing for a chance to win $100 in free gas, if you’re into that kind of thing. They also offer price hike alerts so you can fill up before prices increase, we haven’t tested this feature in our area, but it seems like a cool concept… just don’t get any ideas about "solving the gas crisis" by selling gasoline door-to-door like the Always Sunny in Philadelphia boys. Whether you’re curious if you’re getting the best price on fuel in your area or you’re on a road trip looking for the perfect pit stop, GasBuddy turns out to be a great driving companion app.
Fuelio
Imagine if your Jeep told you when it needed an oil change, tire rotation, brake service or any other item from the manufacturer maintenance schedule. What if your vehicle also told you the total amount you spent on it by category over any given period. With Insane Audio and Fuelio, now it will. This is just one more way that Insane Audio turns your Jeep into a Smart Jeep.
This super powerful app runs beautifully on our products and is all about tracking costs, providing reminders and reporting all the collected data in an easy to consume format. Sure, you can use Fuelio to find cheap fuel nearby, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can also use it to accomplish about a hundred other things, all related to your vehicle’s maintenance needs and expenses. Don’t worry, we’re just covering a few of the top features here. Fuelio lets you calculate and track all your vehicle expenses for multiple vehicles as well as view timelines, cost charts, statistics, and even create exportable reports. You can also sync your data to Dropbox or Google Drive, previously a pro feature, now available in the free version! Fuelio even lets users enable background service to make sure you get scheduled reminders even if the app is closed.
With all this functionality, you might imagine needing a training course to use this app, not the case. Impressively, these guys have organized and packed all these features into a super clean, easy to use interface that feels very natural on your Insane Audio screen, and makes imputing and viewing data intuitive and possible with just a couple taps.
Drivvo
Another Play Store Editor’s choice, Drivvo tries to achieve the same goals as Fuelio, but without the same success in our opinion. The app has some nice graphics and many features similar to those covered in the Fuelio review that allow you to view fuel prices, track expenses, create service reminders and cost reports. That being said, we found the app to be a bit less straightforward to navigate and use. It also contains some menu items that are not really clear about their purpose, maybe this app does require a training course to fully utilize.
A couple other things to consider: Drivvo contains ads in the free version and requires an upgrade to the pro version for $6/year or $1/month to use features that are free in the Fuelio app such as cloud backup and graphic data visualizations. One unique feature Drivvo does offer is the ability to import data from other similar auto data tracking apps if you do decide to switch to Drivvo, but we don’t necessarily recommend doing that.
Fuel Buddy
Fuel Buddy lets you track your vehicle maintenance and service costs and also keep a log of all other car expenses. This app can also alert you when car service is due. Again, this app offers much of the same functionality as Fuelio, it just didn’t strike us as being as user friendly and interestingly enough, actually links to GasBuddy’s website for finding gas prices.
While it’s design isn’t perfect, it has some unique features such as automatic trip logging which automatically detects your business and personal trips and logs them for tax deductions, up to 15 trips per month in the free version. Also, it features built-in voice recognition for quick, hands-free value entry, and the option to store receipt images. For $5.99 (one-time payment) the pro version allows unlimited automatic trip logging, the ability to sync data between multiple drivers, attach logs as CSV files to email, and perhaps most importantly, removes ads.
Gas Guru
If you’re not interested in all the extra tracking and reminder features of the other apps we reviewed here and just want to view nearby gas prices, this might be the app for you. We found the map zooming a bit buggy at first, automatically zooming out just after we zoomed in, but it started working as expected a few minutes later.
Because this app is brought to you by Yellow Pages, the station detail page gives you a phone number (we don’t recall ever needing to call a gas station, but okay) as well as a link to navigate to the station, much more useful, and a list of prices by fuel type and the date which they were last updated.
Insane NavEngine
While we’re on the topic of fuelin’ up, don’t forget Insane NavEngine, Insane Audio’s proprietary on and off-road navigation software that can help you find nearby gas stations, anywhere, anytime with just a couple taps. Insane NavEngine doesn’t offer price information yet, but if you’re cruising down the trail or road and running low on fuel, just hit that NAVI button, then tap Destination > Find Places > Gas Stations to get turn-by-turn navigation to the nearest fuel up.
The best part is, all this information is onboard in your GPS card, so even if you’re out in the middle of freakin’ nowhere with no cell service, Insane NavEngine will guide you in!
That wraps up our rundown of the top fuel and maintenance tracking apps from the Play Store and onboard with your Insane Audio unit. Even if you’re not that interested in getting the cheapest gas around, turning your Jeep into a Smart Jeep that gives you notifications when scheduled maintenance is due or getting you to the nearest gas station in a pinch, is a game changer, and that’s what we’re all about here at Insane Audio!