I downloaded the trial PC and handheld versions of Iambic's Vehicle Manager to give them a “test drive” (pun intended) over the weekend. As a longtime user of competing applications, I’ve been content. But I prefer having a desktop component for applications that I use to manage my life. I felt Vehicle Manager at $19.95 might fill this requirement nicely in the vehicle department.

After installing Vehicle Manager, I entered the information for each of our three vehicles. You can record model, make, year, plate number and VIN for each vehicle. You can also upload a picture for the desktop application. There are places for recording insurance and dealer information and any notes required for individual vehicles. I manually entered my 2008 fuel consumption data from a competing application for my primary vehicle. I wanted to run VM and TA side by side for a more fair comparison.

My first impression was that VM’s user interface is considerably less “busy”, both on the handheld and the desktop, than I expected. Vehicle Manager has its choices (minus a parking timer) nestled in the dropdown menus, leaving a clean screen with only your entries displayed. Very appealing for the minimalist.

Vehicle Manager is quite customizable, as you can choose to display all entries or narrow down by one of several categories, including fuel, repair/maintenance, trips or other expenses. Once a category has been chosen, you can again designate to list by date, description, odometer reading or $ amount, and rank them in either ascending or descending order. You can also vary the dates displayed in ranges varying from one week to year-to-date, or select custom date parameters that you choose.

For fuel entries, date, odometer reading, amount in gallons, cost per gallon and vendor are included. From the main screen, it’s difficult to see all of this information on the mobile screen but you can tap or scroll via the 5-way to open individual transactions to see all the data if needed. You can choose from the provided list of “Big Oil”, or customize to add your own fuel stations or brands, and there’s also the ability to make notes for each individual entry as well.

One major disappointment is the surprising absence of a MPG (miles per gallon) calculation for each fuel entry, as offered in competing applications, which would enable you to monitor your mileage tank by tank. This can be helpful if, for instance, you’re vacationing in the mountains and you’re towing a travel trailer. You could monitor the effect of varying vehicle and driving conditions on your actual fuel usage. And one of my chief motivations for purchasing a vehicle management app to begin with was to be able to track the tank-by-tank mileage in my aging ’95 Tacoma. In the current climate of rapidly increasing fuel costs, it’s likely that nearly everyone is scrutinizing their fuel usage, so this glaring omission from VM is puzzling.

On the other hand, Vehicle Manager does provide a nifty feature – “Quick Stats” – which does offer your average mileage and a number of other average measurements based on the cumulative totals of your entries. I especially liked seeing the “Cost of Ownership”. Currently, without factoring in car payment or insurance, our ’03 Tundra almost becomes a bargain at $1.28 per 100 miles.

Another handy feature missing from Vehicle Manager is a parking meter timer. I don’t use it very often, as there are only parking meters in the downtown area of my fair city, so this isn’t a deal breaker in my estimation. But for the user in a major metro area, this would be a handy feature to have on board.

You can enter reminders by date or mileage for maintenance, such as oil changes, wiper blade replacement, tire rotation, radiator flush, tune up or any other miscellaneous tasks that you designate.

One issue I have with Vehicle Manager’s operation is its annoying habit of recalculating my fuel entries after I enter them. Inevitably I find that my price per gallon, # of gallons and total cost per fill up get slightly readjusted, as the internal calculations for decimal points on the gas pump and the applications apparently just don’t agree. Of course, we’re talking only pennies here, but that doesn’t reduce my frustration. Vehicle Manager doesn’t offer a preference to allow you to determine the number of decimal places to which you’d like to carry out, which might solve the problem, but you math wizards would know better than I.

Vehicle Manager can be used for a number of vehicles, even a fleet if needed. It is meant to be used either in the US or abroad, and can be customized accordingly to use US gallons, Imperial gallons or liters, as well as miles and kilometers. The Tools/Options dropdown allows you to set your specific designations. You can also customize the rate for mileage reimbursement here.

If you are so inclined, you can even export your data to an Excel spreadsheet with the click of one button in the desktop version, which would be very handy for those using the application to manage a number of vehicles or a fleet. In the desktop app, you could select the category “Trips” and export the data to a spreadsheet for the purpose of mileage reimbursement for expenses. For Excel power users, you can customize your Excel export settings.

On the initial sync, my entered data transferred seamlessly from the desktop to the device. Subsequent syncs removed the data. I uninstalled the application and reinstalled it. A sync wiped the data on the desktop application (forgot to set desktop overrides handheld in the conduit). Once that was rectified, I synced again and got the data to transfer. It appears that the desktop and handheld apps do not calculate mileage identically, as my “Quick Stats” on the handheld was drastically different from that of the desktop app – my Tundra now costs $22 per 100 miles. I checked the individual entries and they were correct but the decimals were carried out by seven places – the fuel consumption rate was listed as 6.59 gals per 100 miles on the desktop versus 6.5469613 gals per 100 miles on the device. Something is definitely amiss and I'm sure will be resolved in updates.

In conclusion, I must admit my weakness for Iambic applications, as I enjoy their clean, colorful user interfaces. It will take me the full trial period and/or possibly several versions, however, to fully determine whether or not to make the leap to Vehicle Manager. I do like it quite a lot, but may continue to record my info on my old standby.

Related Links

Vehicle Manager for Windows Mobile

Vehicle Manager for Windows

Vehicle Manager desktop & mobile bundles