For many, a car is a platform for potential life experiences. And today, we’re spending more time in our cars than ever--with 144 million Americans spending an average of 52 minutes in a car each day, 76% of them alone. Yet this time remains a whitespace which is neither tracked, nor easily sharable.

SmileDrive starts with a social app that lets you record and share every drive. Once the SmileDrive app is paired with your car’s Bluetooth connection, it automatically keeps track of all your drives, how much time you’re spending in your car, where you’ve driven and allows you to share stories from the road via Google+. To make things a little more interesting, it tries to quantify the fun factor for your drives based on data like weather, distance, traffic, and social interactions.

Some drives are so much fun, you want to share them with friends and family. When you create a Smilecast, you can record and share your road trip as it unfolds, through photos and social updates on Google+ from you and your co-passengers, all pulled into an interactive map.

SmileDrive connects drivers with their cars in new and exciting ways to make every drive more fun. Tools and technical innovations include:

BLUETOOTH INTEGRATION

SmileDrive passively detects when a driver enters and leaves their car by connecting to the car’s Bluetooth. The process is seamless, making it easy to track everyday drives and more memorable ones. Everyone can use the app—even non-VW owners.

GPS

SmileDrive collects thousands of GPS points for each drive. That data is passed to servers and also leveraged by the app for many real-time alerts. For instance, when the algorithm calculates movement over a certain speed, the app goes into “Safe Mode,” locking the screen to keep the user focused on the fun of their drive. Also, by grabbing the last known location when a user leaves the vehicle, we help users “Find My Car”.

GOOGLE MAPS

As GPS data is collected, we leverage the Google Maps API to transform location data into an interactive and exploratory version of the journey. Serverside processes comb through generated routes to intelligently correct for bad GPS and provide even more accurate representations of drives for each user.

GOOGLE+

Use of Google+ allows every driver to connect to their friends and family, inviting them to join Smilecasts and share them with their circles. Drivers and passengers can manage photos from their road trips, which are automatically collected in a Google+ photo album for each new Smilecast. Photos and status updates made while driving are automatically plotted on SmileDrive’s interactive maps, allowing users to relive their trips from start to finish.

GOOGLE APP ENGINE

At the core of SmileDrive is a cloud of data recorded, calculated, and served to thousands of users in real-time by App Engine’s scalable platform.

The SmileDrive initiative brings Volkswagen’s brand promise of “it’s not the miles, it’s the how you live them” to life. Through an app and web product, you can share fun moments and experiences from the road with your friends and communities. SmileDrive focuses on the fun people have in their cars, and how a car can be a conduit for amazing life experiences. As a brand, Volkswagen wants to build lasting relationships with its customers around their shared interests, like travel, photography or food. This app, which brings together driving and sharing, is a way to do just that, and hopefully make people feel like part of a big family.

Within three months of launch, SmileDrive accompanied drivers on over 230,000 drives, covering over 1.1 million miles, proving to make drives more shareable, engaging, and memorable.