Odometer tracking and maintenance reminders.
 

I track by odometer reading, since I sometimes use my trip meter for other purposes, and it also prevents me from "forgetting" to reset the trip meter. Since you already have the odometer reading, is there any way Fuelly could remind me of upcoming maintenance at set intervals?

For instance, my normal oil change interval is 5000 miles. If there was a checkbox on the fuel-up page marked "Maintenance", and an input box for "Type of maintenance" and "Maintenance interval" where I could enter "Oil change" and "5000", then Fuelly could remind me at 4000 or 4500 miles from that fuel-up that it's time to buy oil and filter again, and display the odometer reading for the upcoming maintenance, (last oil change)+5000.

I realize there are other tools for this, but since I don't presently use them, and I do use Fuelly . . .

Obviously, this could get out of hand, you could have maintenance intervals for darn near everything, and it could become bloated and cumbersome.

I realize this is probably a non-trivial task, but just thought I'd throw it out there.

Thanks for the suggestion. We've talked about this quite a bit and it's on our "to do someday" list. We know we don't want to do automatic reminders based on manufacturer recommendations--that's too much data to round up. But people setting their own reminders sounds reasonable.

The reason we haven't tackled this to this point is that we don't want to get too far off our mission statement. Maintenance reminders don't have much to do with tracking fuel economy, and we don't want to be a "track everything that has to do with your car" site. Adding reminders sets us on a path toward that and we're not quite ready to follow it all the way to "track everything".

Having said all that, I do think we'll do this in some form.

Thanks for the reply pb. I really expected you to say that it had been discussed already, it just seemed too obvious.

Yes, trying to track manufacturer recommended intervals would be a bit much. Letting each user set the interval would be the way to go, IMO.

Maybe a drop down list for maintenance type, Oil change+filter, fuel filter, air filter, tire rotation, whatever. That would keep it manageable. If enough people asked for another maintenance item, then it could be added to the list.

For me, I use Fuelly as a maintenance record just as much as I do a fuel mileage record. I just leave a note by itself or on a fuel up with a "maintenance" tag and describe what I did and the odo reading. Then I can just sort by tags and find all the maintenance I've done since I started logging. Plus if I sell the car, I can just print out a combined fuel economy + maintenance log for the length of my ownership. I think this site is already just as useful for maintenance logging as it is for mileage logging.

BDC, great idea. I believe I'll start doing that.

I still think having Fuelly pop up a reminder at whatever interval you want would be nice.