Carspel Now Tracks Your Drives Automatically — Without Draining Your Battery or Adding Another Subscription
If you've used MileIQ for a while, you've probably felt the last twelve months. Two price increases in 2026 pushed the unlimited plan up roughly 50% from where it started the year, and the jump landed with little warning at renewal for a lot of long-time users. Nothing about the app itself changed to justify it — same swipe-to-classify workflow, same background tracking, same complaints about it quietly draining a phone's battery over the course of a day. A lot of people who'd used it for years suddenly went looking for something else.
We weren't building Auto Trip as a reaction to that — it's been in development since before the second price hike — but the timing means it's worth explaining plainly: what it does, where it fits alongside the rest of your garage, and where it's honestly still not the right tool for you.
What Auto Trip actually does
Auto Trip runs in the background and detects when you're driving, without you having to open the app, tap start, or remember anything before you pull out of the driveway. Each drive gets logged with distance, start and end points, and a route, and you tag it as business or personal afterward — the same swipe-style classification most automatic trackers use, because it's the part of this category that already works well.
The part we spent the most time on is the part that's easy to get wrong: battery impact. Always-on GPS tracking is the single most common complaint against automatic mileage apps, MileIQ included, and it's a real engineering trade-off, not a settings toggle you can just flip. Auto Trip uses low-power location and motion signals to detect that a drive has started before it engages more precise GPS tracking, rather than polling GPS continuously all day whether you're in the car or not. It won't be literally zero battery impact — nothing that tracks your location in the background can promise that honestly — but it's built to be something you can leave running without watching your battery percentage drop all afternoon.
Auto Trip is available on both Android and iOS at launch. If you've read our Carspel vs. Fuelio, Drivvo & MileIQ comparison from earlier this year, this closes two of the gaps we were upfront about at the time — no automatic detection, and no iOS app. Both are addressed now.
Why this isn't "just another mileage app"
Here's the part we want to be direct about, the same way we were in that earlier comparison: if defensible, tax-ready mileage records are your entire need — nothing else, just mileage — a dedicated app built solely around that problem, with years of refinement specifically for CRA or IRS reporting, may still serve you better as a single-purpose tool. That hasn't changed.
What's different is what happens to the trip once it's logged. In most mileage-only apps, a business trip lives in its own silo, disconnected from what that drive actually cost you in fuel or charging, disconnected from the car's service history, disconnected from everything else happening in the household garage. In Carspel, an automatically detected trip sits on the same timeline as your fuel fill-ups, EV charging sessions, and service records for that vehicle — so the mileage isn't an isolated log you check once a quarter for taxes, it's one more layer of a garage record that's already tracking the rest of the car's life. If you're logging a plug-in hybrid, that trip data sits right next to which portion of your driving happened on battery versus gas.
Auto Trip is a Family and Ultimate feature, alongside up to five household members sharing the garage — which fits how most multi-driver households actually use automatic tracking: more than one person's drives need to be classified and attributed correctly, not just one.
One more thing that shipped alongside it: smart receipt scanning
Auto Trip wasn't the only thing we'd been building. Fuel receipts photographed through the app are now read automatically, and if the receipt includes a car wash charge bundled in with the fuel, Carspel separates it out — the fuel cost goes into your fuel log where it belongs, and the car wash becomes its own service entry, complete with a dismissible reminder for the wash code if the receipt includes one. It's a small thing, but it removes one of the more annoying manual corrections in fuel logging: manually splitting a receipt that mixed two different costs into one number.
We'll walk through that one properly, with a demo, in a future post — for now, if you're already in the app, it's worth photographing your next fuel receipt just to see it happen.
The honest version of this
If you're specifically shopping for a MileIQ replacement because of the price, and mileage is genuinely the only thing you need tracked, it's worth comparing Auto Trip against a dedicated mileage-only app before you decide — some of them are cheaper if that's truly all you want. Where Auto Trip earns its place is if you're also the household tracking fuel or charging costs, service history, or a mixed garage of gas and electric vehicles, and you'd rather have one system that knows about all of it than a mileage app plus a separate fuel log plus a spreadsheet nobody keeps up to date.
That's the trade we built Carspel around from the start, and it's the same standard we're holding this update to: not "automatic tracking exists now," but "automatic tracking exists now, on the same timeline as everything else in your garage, without costing you a full afternoon of battery to get it."
Auto Trip is live now on Family and Ultimate plans, with a 30-day free trial that includes full Ultimate access if you want to try it before choosing a tier.