Torque developers,

I have an idea for the Torque app. Please have Torque calculate the percentage of highway and city driving a driver does each trip and/or over a length of time.

A lot of people (myself included) would like to know what percentage of city driving and highway driving they do when calculating mpg (and for various other reasons). It would be very hard to keep track of this manually but I believe this can be done automatically in the app when the app is active and connected. I drive a lot of city driving but I think I may be getting a lower mpg estimate then what my vehicle is rated at. I may also be overestimating in guessing my highway driving miles.

Here is generally how my idea would work. As soon as the app is active and is connected to the OBD port, with this feature enabled, Torque would start monitoring a users speed and every 10-60 seconds would record either a “city” tick or a “highway” tick or an “idle” tick depending on the users speed. If a user is traveling at 55mph or under, then this would be calculated at that moment in time as city driving. 56mph or over and it would be considered highway. 0mph would be “idle”. This would happen all the way up until the vehicle is shut off. When the vehicle is shut off the app would then calculate the difference between the number of city, highway and idle ticks and list this as a percentage for each. The city/highway/idle percentage would be calculated and recorded for that trip. These trips could be averaged together for an overall average.

While I realize 56mph and over could be driven on city streets in some instances, I think for most people, the 56mph and over is mostly driven on the highway. However, I realize city and highway speeds are objective. Because of this maybe the user could change the highway threshold speed manually (instead of a fixed 56mph).

Please have Torque calculate the percentage of highway and city driving a driver does each trip and/or over a length of time.

Thank you.

I “edited” the original post to include an “idle” tick in addition to the “city” and “highway” ticks, as knowing your idle times (and its effect on your mpg) would be very beneficial for us stop and go traffic/city travelers.

Hi Piemmm,

Its been about a month since I made this request. Has this feature been added to 1.8.72? If not, any “ballpark” ETA on when?

Thanks

Will probably set it to something like less than 4mph for idle. Likely to be implemented fairly soon

Edit: Completed, will be in the next beta update, then in the full release once it’s passed

Ian,

Thank you for adding this feature. This feature will really help a lot of people determine if they are getting accurate miles per gallon. It is a step in the right direction.

I see you have been largely absent from the forum. I hope you and your family are well.

Perhaps you could recruit some people to assist you with coding of the app and with moderating the forum while you are away from time to time.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the reply back and I am glad you are doing ok.

This feature is working great for me. No problems what so ever.

I am requesting a few more things with it though.

Right now, as it stands, the “idle”, “highway” and “city” mileage percentages are only calculated per trip, meaning, once the Torque app is closed, these percentages restart.

I noticed it is like this with all Torque stats (like MPG, average speed etc.)

The goal for me is too see how much city, highway and idle time a person does over say, a tankful of gas (or 500 miles).

Some trips are really short and all city. Others could be long and all highway. Basically, these short trips are not indicative of the overall average a person does. A way to store, average and display these numbers/stats over a reasonable period of time would be awesome!

1. Is there anyway to make these percentages and all Torque stats (like MPG, average speed etc.) stored on the phone?

—The idea would be to get an average of these stats over many trips, regardless of if the app closes or not

— These stored, calculated and averaged stats could be cleared out of the phones hard drive memory by clicking the “trip reset button”

— These stored, calculated and averaged stats could also be cleared out of the phones hard drive memory after a set time, say after 500 miles traveled.

This should help prevent any hard drive space memory problems when storing, calculating and averaging all these numbers.

Thank you for the awesome work you have done so far with the app on so many levels. Torque is awesome!

Just my 5 cents (that’s the smallest denomination we have here now):

I drive mostly rural highway, and Torque reports almost all of it as “City”, which it certainly isn’t. I think there’s more to determining city vs. highway than speed. In my mind, what defines “City” driving is stop-and-go, whereas “Highway” is at a continuous reasonably high speed (e.g. above 60km/h or 40mph).

This means of course that a given stretch of driving can’t be determined as city or highway until after the fact. If I drive at 60km/h non-stop for 10 minutes, it was highway. If I drive in 60 second bursts accelerating to 80km/h and then stopping, it’s city.