Considering the number of mobile apps dedicated to the subject I know I’m not alone in wanting to know the fuel consumption of my vehicles. Like my father, I have been doing that as long as I have driven motor vehicles on two and four wheels. Since 2013 or so I am using AndiCar (on Android): it has the features I want, and it’s a piece of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Keeping an eye on your fuel consumption is always a good idea, since a rise in numbers can be the first indicator of a problem with your vehicle.
When we bought a bi-fuel car, however, things got complicated. In November 2017, as far as I could tell, there were no apps that had full support for “hybrid” or bi-fuel vehicles. I had no choice but to start experimenting a bit, and I settled on testing an app called Fuelio as a possible alternative for AndiCar. I won’t do a complete comparative review of these two: let me just explain that AndiCar is faster for data entry (at least in my situation: I enter the data in the evening or in the weekend, when I’m at home, not in the gas station), and Fuelio is the better looking app.

Some of the statistics available in the apps I mentioned (AndiCar on the left, Fuelio on the right). The numbers do not correspond because the periods are different, not because of errors ;-)
So I mailed Miklós, the author of AndiCar, explaining my situation. I probably wasn’t the first one to mention the “multi-fuel problem” to him. Nevertheless I’m quite impressed with the fact that six weeks later he already published a new version of AndiCar that allows detailed data entry for hybrid vehicles like mine. To top it off, he also mailed me to tell me about the new version!
One of the advantages of AndiCar is that it allows you to define your own fuel types. I actually use three types of fuel, since we have two types of CNG in Belgium: low caloric content (L) and high caloric content (H) gas. AndiCar is perfectly capable of handling that.
As a happy person I simply had to respond to Miklós – here’s the core of my mail:
Good work, man! You impressed me with the speed with which you implemented the support for alternative fuel vehicles. I’m not just giving you last version “a look”: I have copied all the fill-ups of my new car into AndiCar, of course.
For the moment I will continue to compare AndiCar with Fuelio, if only to get a feeling for what might constitute a good solution for the “fuel consumption/efficiency calculation” issue, as you call it. The Fuelio solution is not good enough: it just uses the distance between the two latest fillings for that type of fuel. But that results in silly numbers when driving most kilometers with one type of fuel, interspersed with an occasional fill-up of the alternative fuel (and that’ what I try to do: run mostly on CNG because it’s cleaner, just switching to petrol when no CNG is available).
What is probably needed, is a system whereby it is possible to indicate for each fill-up whether it can be used for a consumption calculation based on the previous fill-up of the same fuel type. Or perhaps an extra odometer field ? Or …? I realise that my situation is different from that of people with electric hybrid cars: my g-tron runs on CNG as long as there is enough of it in the tank, and switches to petrol with an explicit warning the moment that switch happens. In e-hybrids the rules are completely different, and I have no ideas about how AndiCar (or any other app) could support such calculations – I suppose those cars can do it themselves ;-)
Oh well. I’m already quite happy with the work you’ve done, so thanks again!
PS. I ran into one issue when entering my fill-ups in AndiCar: trying to “convert” an existing entry to the new fuel type and UOM crashed the app (I tried it several times). But of course, deleting the existing entry and reentering the data in a new entry solved the issue, so no real harm done.
If only all software makers would be so friendly and so quick to react to their users!
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