One day long ago, I needed to purchase a new vehicle. Anyone who’s purchased a vehicle knows how much “fun” it is to scour the internet to find just the right vehicle and drive to the dealership just to wait for a half-hour for a test drive, but why? In this case, I was looking for a 2015 Blue Ford Focus ST. It needed to have a black interior, a large infotainment system, and of course a manual transmission. These were harder to find than they should be, but the internet lets you know everything about a vehicle before you show up…except where it is on the lot.
On each visit to a dealership, I arrived with the vehicle identification number (VIN) in hand, only for the dealership team to jump from overflow lot to overflow lot in order to find the exact vehicle I wanted to buy. Even for 2015, this was infuriating. It’s bad enough I had to contend with fighting off all the add-ons on the backend, but now I have to deal with the delays on the front end as well. Something needed to be done, so I did it.
I dreamed up an idea where vehicle locations would be saved in an online database, accessible to all members of the team. From either an Android or iOS, dealerships should be able to type or scan a VIN, and instantly locate the last location a vehicle was parked. After months of teaching myself the basics of coding in Android Studio and Xcode, the VPLocation App was born.
VPLocation uses a few innovative functions to operate. At it’s core is a Firebase Realtime Database. This service, provided by Google, provides realtime query responses to apps looking for a vehicle’s location. The query response provides more than just a location. The vehicle’s year, make, and model are returned as well, so the operator knows exactly what type of vessel they’re looking for. Lastly, when the vehicle’s location is received, a point is dropped on a Google map with the location, and an option to get directions to the location.
This is by far the biggest jump in technology, as the apps required a ton of debugging and development. Even though the app isn’t currently being used by a dealership, it’s my greatest coding accomplishment. Maybe I’ll sale it or translate it for other uses in the future. For a quick video on how it operates, check out this video.