aCar - Car Management, Mileage

Review by eFreeware

Most car owners keep their service history in a glove box folder, a notes app or their memory, and none of those options tell you much when the oil light comes on or when you want to know what a year of driving actually cost. A logbook app solves that, but only if entering a fill-up takes seconds and the numbers add up on their own.

aCar is one of the better-known options in that space. It comes from Fuelly, LLC, sits in the Auto & Vehicles category, and has been downloaded more than a million times. It is free to install, carries ads and offers in-app purchases, and it has a 1.9 average from 21,079 ratings, a figure worth keeping in mind as you read on.

The pitch is straightforward: track fill-ups, fuel mileage, maintenance, services, expenses, trips, accidents and notes for every vehicle you own, whether that is a car, a truck, a motorcycle, an ATV or a snowmobile. The developer's own summary describes it as a way to keep the fill-ups, maintenance, mileage, trips and expenses of your vehicles in one place.

Fill-ups, mileage and what the numbers tell you

The core of the app is the fill-up record, and it is the feature the developer leads with. Each entry feeds a fuel economy calculation that can be displayed in MPG, gallons per 100 miles, miles per liter, kilometers per gallon, liters per 100 kilometers or kilometers per liter, so you are not stuck with one convention. If you have ever tried to compare a European car's consumption figures with an American one, that range of units is the difference between a useful log and a headache.

Units can also be set per vehicle rather than globally. One car can be tracked in kilometers and liters while another stays in miles and gallons, which matters in a household where a daily driver and a weekend truck were bought in different markets or simply logged by different habits.

The mileage figures are only as good as the records behind them, and the app leans on that data in other places. Full-screen charts visualize fill-ups, services, expenses and trips, and the statistics section pulls the whole history together. For anyone who wants to know whether their fuel costs are creeping up or whether a repair actually fixed a consumption problem, that is the payoff.

Maintenance reminders, expenses and trip records

Beyond fuel, aCar handles the rest of vehicle ownership. You can log services, expenses, trips marked as business or personal, accident records, purchase and selling details, notes, and even the specifications of parts fitted to the vehicle. Multiple vehicles are supported, and the developer describes the classification options as covering a wide range of vehicle types rather than just cars.

Reminders are one of the more thoughtful parts. The developer says you can create standalone reminders or have them generated automatically after you enter a service record, and they can be based on time or mileage for items such as engine oil and the air filter. That auto-creation idea appeals to me: log an oil change and the next one schedules itself, which is the sort of detail that keeps a logbook alive past the first enthusiastic month.

Day-to-day access is handled through home screen widgets and shortcuts. There are widgets for the console, service reminders, predictions, fuel efficiency and fuel price, plus shortcuts that jump straight to a new fill-up, service, expense or trip. If the app is going to be useful, it has to be reachable in the moment you are standing at the pump, and these are the pieces that make that possible.

The developer also lists profile pictures for vehicles, GPS location support, social sharing of activities and statistical charts, and the ability to move the app to an SD card. The interface is described as clean and modern with easy data entry; that is the developer's characterization, and it is the kind of claim only your own use can confirm.

Sync, backup and moving your history in

Records can be backed up to the fuelly.com cloud, synchronized across multiple devices and with the Fuelly website, and the app can also sync with iOS devices when Gas Cubby by Fuelly is in use. Automatic monthly backups are available, alongside manual and more frequent automatic ones, so there is more than one way to keep a copy.

Import is unusually broad. Data can be imported from a long set of mobile apps, including Auto 3in1, AutoMobile, Car Care, FuelLog, Gas Cubby, Mileage, MPG, My Cars, Road Trip, TealAuto, Trip Cubby, Trip and Trip Deluxe, and Vehicle Manager, plus from websites such as Fuelly.com, FuelFrog.com, SpritMonitor.de and TrackYourGasMileage.com. More CSV formats from Fuelly.com can be brought in as well. For anyone with years of records kept elsewhere, that import support is what makes switching realistic.

Getting data out is covered too. Records and statistics can be exported to Excel-compatible CSV or to HTML you can open in a browser. That matters if you ever want to hand a service history to a buyer or work the numbers in a spreadsheet rather than on a phone screen.

The app is localized into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Danish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Greek and Slovak, with the developer noting more are planned.

What aCar asks of you

aCar is free to download and contains ads, with in-app purchases available. The developer marks one feature as premium: adding photos and PDFs to your records. Everything else falls under the standard feature set, so the paid element is a narrow addition rather than a separate tier of the app.

The real cost is discipline. A logbook only produces useful mileage and cost figures if fill-ups go in consistently, ideally every time you fill the tank rather than every few weeks. The reminders and widgets are there to lower that effort, but they cannot remove it.

There is also a cloud component. Backup and multi-device synchronization run through fuelly.com. On the hardware side, moving the app to an SD card is supported on Android 2.2 and later, and GPS support is listed for location features.

Finally, the app's reception is worth weighing. A 1.9 average across 21,079 ratings is low for an app with this many installs, and the developer's own listing asks users to report bugs and issues through the app rather than in store reviews. That request suggests a support process exists, but it also tells you the developer has had to manage feedback actively. The most recent update, from January 23, 2025, added the ability to delete an account.

Getting useful numbers out of it

The single habit that makes an app like this work is recording every fill-up, not just the ones you remember. Fuel economy is calculated from the distance between fills and the volume added, so a skipped entry throws off the figure that follows it. If you are going to log anything, log the pump visits.

Set up reminders early rather than after the first missed service. Because the app can generate a reminder automatically when you enter a service record, the natural routine is to log the work and let the next interval schedule itself, using time or mileage depending on what the job calls for.

Use the per-vehicle unit settings deliberately. If you own vehicles bought in different countries or maintained by different people, giving each one its own units keeps the charts readable instead of forcing everything into a single convention. The same goes for vehicle type: the developer supports cars, trucks, motorcycles, ATV/UTV and snowmobiles, so a mixed garage does not need a second app.

If you are arriving with an existing history, do the import before you start adding new records. The developer supports imports from a long list of apps and fuel-tracking websites, and starting clean and then trying to merge old data later is the harder path. Once the history is in, the statistics and full-screen charts are where the value shows up.

A logbook for people who will actually keep it

aCar covers the ground a vehicle logbook should cover: fill-ups and fuel economy in the units you prefer, maintenance with time- or mileage-based reminders, expenses, trips, accident and purchase records, notes, and support for several vehicles of different types. The import and export options are broader than I would expect from a free app, and the cloud backup through fuelly.com gives the records somewhere to live beyond one phone.

It is free with ads and in-app purchases, and photos and PDFs attached to records sit behind the premium label. Sync and backup run through the Fuelly cloud.

This suits someone with more than one vehicle, or a single vehicle they intend to keep for a long time, who wants fuel costs, service intervals and running expenses in one place and is willing to enter data at the pump. If you already keep records in another app or a fuel-tracking website, the import support makes the move plausible. If you want something that runs itself with no input from you, no logbook will do that, and this one is no exception.

What's new in version 5.6.12

Added delete account