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Four Drivers, One Car, One Trip Log: How Carspel Now Knows Who Was Behind the Wheel

If your household has one car and more than one driver — a partner, a teenager who just got their licence, a roommate splitting gas money — you already know the specific kind of mess that creates in any mileage or fuel app built for one person. Every trip log we've ever seen assumes a single account, a single driver, a single "you." The moment a second person touches the wheel, that assumption quietly breaks, and nobody notices until it's time to split a fuel bill fairly, or explain to an accountant why one household member's business trips are mixed in with another's grocery runs.

We just shipped the fix for that.

Who drove?

Trips added in a multi-member household now show Who drove? chips — on the Add trip form, and on the review banner when Auto Trip hands you a drafted drive to confirm. Pick the household member, and the trip is stored against them, not just whoever happens to be signed into the app that week. If your teenager adds their own trips but the household subscription lives under your account, their drives are still theirs on the record — not silently folded into yours.

That sounds small until you picture the actual situations it fixes:

  • Splitting costs fairly. If two people share one car, "who put on the most kilometres this month" stops being a guess or an argument — it's in the log, per person.
  • Keeping tax trips clean. If one household member logs business trips for their own work, and someone else in the family drives the same car for personal errands, those trips don't get tangled together under one name on a report.
  • Actually knowing who was where. Less about accounting, more about the ordinary question every shared-car household asks weekly: "wait, who had the car Tuesday afternoon?"

This shows up automatically once your household has more than one member — which, practically speaking, means Family or Ultimate plans (or the trial, which behaves the same way), since Basic doesn't support household invites at all. If you're a solo driver, you won't see the chips, because there's nothing to attribute.

Where did I park?

Shipped right alongside driver attribution, and built for the same kind of household: Where did I park? drops a pin at the last spot Auto Trip detected the car went stationary, with a Walk back option and, if you choose to turn it on, a way for other household members to find the car too — a genuinely useful thing when one person drove to the mall and someone else needs to know where the car is.

It's opt-in on purpose. Nobody sees that pin unless you've turned on Let household find this car, and it only exists at all if Auto Trip was active for that drive — so it's a Family/Ultimate/Trial, native-app feature, not something Basic or the web app currently offers.

Why this is genuinely hard for a single-user app

Most fuel and mileage apps aren't designed badly here so much as designed for a different problem entirely: one person, one phone, one driving history. Retrofitting "actually, several people drive this car" onto that model means either forcing everyone to keep separate accounts for one vehicle (which breaks the point of a shared garage) or just not solving it and hoping nobody asks. Carspel's household model — one garage, several invited members, one shared vehicle record — is what makes attributing an individual trip to an individual driver possible without either of those compromises.

The honest version of this

This isn't a GPS tracker that watches everyone in the house all the time. Auto Trip only runs when a household member has it turned on for their own phone, Where did I park is opt-in per person, and neither feature exists on Basic or on iOS yet — Carspel's native app is still Android-only while we go through Apple's review process, with a web version at app.carspel.ca covering iPhone in the meantime. If your household is one driver and one car, none of this changes anything for you; if it's more than that, it's probably the first time your trip log has actually matched how your family really uses the car.

Who drove? and Where did I park? ship with Family, Ultimate, and the 30-day trial — see what’s included →

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