Vehicle Security and Monitoring — from your cellphone?

It’s two a.m. Do you know where your car is? A new vehicle security and monitoring system by Hosaku International Corporation seeks to allay the fear of every parent, spouse, fleet manager and car owner when it comes to the state of one’s vehicle, and more importantly, the person it’s currently entrusted to. It’s a little box you install under the dash, it communicates via SIM, it uses the same hi-tech network of GPS satellites that were used to bomb Saddam into the next life, and it’s called TrakM8.

Pronounced as "Track Mate", it’s based on the popular GSM cellular network and the constellation of Global Positioning Satellites provided free by the US. Once a SIM card of your choice is installed in the TrakM8 unit that will be concealed in your car, a wealth of security and monitoring systems is enabled. Better yet, you don’t need any fancy gizmos to control it. All you’ll need is your existing GSM cellular phone.

TrakM8 features include location checks on your car (say, if you lent it to your daughter who said she’s going to a party where her crush will be), Security Shield, Curfew, Immobilize, Automatic Journey Report, Zone, and Speed/Time/Distance Reports.

Let’s hypothesize that you invest in a TrakM8 system for your car and said daughter rolls out of the garage around 9 p.m., promising to be home by 1 a.m. Knowing to quietly add another hour to your loved one’s guesstimate, you go to bed for a nap. At 12:30, you wake up and text "Where" to your car’s SIM. Then it texts back something approximating this: "Your car is 1.1 km west of SM Megamall on Canley Road traveling at 0 kmh". At which point your blood pressure goes up, your world comes crashing down around your ears, and you understand the truth in the saying that daughters are God’s punishment for your hormonal sowing-your-wild-oats years.

But you eventually calm down and decide to wait another ten minutes. "Maybe they’re just... talking?", you fervently pray. So you text "Where" once again and are relieved that she’s moving already and unsuspectingly heading home for a nice talk with her loving father. Unfortunately, you remember that TrakM8’s speed limit notice is on and your car text’s you something like "Warning: Your car has exceeded the speed limit of 150 kph 3.2 km north of Ayala Avenue."

The blood pressure goes up once again and you quietly settle on the porch to await your beloved daughter who apparently has a heart like a wheel. If your b.p., goes up some more, maybe she can drive you to the hospital. She eventually arrives and parks on the street, but there’s hesitation as she opens the driver’s door because she’s just seen you, and she knows she’s been caught. The door closes and you can see her fumbling with the keys as she tries to re-start the car. So you send yet another text message: "IMMOBON", which is a very useful command to have for those with TrakM8 and a car alarm/immobilizer installed. TrakM8’s Immobilizer function disables a car’s starter until you turn it off by texting "IMMOBOFF". Cool, eh? Then you trot over to the passenger side of your car, plop into the seat, and have a nice conversation with your offspring.

Besides being of immense value to parents who want peace-of-mind when it comes to the whereabouts of their loved ones, TrakM8 can also be of similar utility to suspicious spouses, "kidnappables", politicians, bosses (especially for those with chronically late employees), fleet managers, and regular people who hire drivers to chaffeur the family around. Besides location and Immobilizer functions, other useful features include the Security Shield that alerts you if your car moves more than 100 meters in any direction. If your car alarm sounds, your car will also text you about it so that you can perform immediate action.

If you want to restrict the usage of your car, you can set a curfew that disables the starter at certain times of the day. An Automatic Journey Report, on the other hand, provides statistics on each trip that the car makes, including location, time, date the trip begins and ends, distance traveled, maximum speed, and time spent idling.

If you get into an emergency (Blown engine? Suspicious-looking checkpoints?), an SOS button will send an SMS to all the other SIM cards you have tied-in to your TrakM8’s sending list.

With nationwide coverage, over 1,600 landmarks identified all over the country and embedded into each unit, TrakM8 can practically locate any vehicle no matter where it is. As an added bonus — and perhaps to offset the current sticker price of P49,888 — there are no monthly charges. All you must pay for TrakM8’s services once you’ve bought the unit are your GSM charges, whether prepaid or postpaid.

Because it’s based on the 24-satellite GPS system currently floating in space as you read this, the system promises to be accurate to 2 to 8 meters. TrakM8’s limitations are that GPS can’t penetrate most buildings or thick vegetation, and if your GSM network goes down, so will your TrakM8. However, a loss of signal from either the GPS or GSM network will trigger a notice to your phone informing you of your vehicle’s last known whereabouts.

For those who are worried about the Big Brother implications of such a system, Hosaku International assures that it’s purely a SIM card-based system. Unless you voluntarily give them the numbers of your phone and that of your TrakM8, there is no way that they or anybody else can track you and use the data for whatever purpose. Also, the Immobilize command won’t work if your car is moving. This is for safety concerns; a stolen car on the highway with a dead engine can be quite hazardous to people’s health. However, send the command anyway and the car will be immobilized the moment the ignition is turned off.

Other features include a closed user group so you may tie in up to eight other phones to access your car, as well as the option to add your own points of reference to the preset landmarks in the Philippines. There’s even a command to inform you of the fastest 0-100 km/h acceleration time.

TrakM8 is only the tip of the iceberg for Hosaku, however, because various GPS-based systems are already being developed. There’s MapM8, which is a computerized monitoring system designed to monitor the movement of fleets of vehicles using TrakM8. Then there’s the tentatively called PhoneM8, which will incorporate real-time tracking and monitoring of individuals through the GPS system. Besides the above mentioned market for TrakM8, Hosaku is also eyeing car manufacturers to put TrakM8 in vehicles as OEM-spec.