Find My Car Smarter uses Bluetooth Smart to locate your car

The Incase Car charger sells for $35 & the Griffin for $30 at the Apple Store. The chargers sold at the 99¢ may not have good PSSR and transient power spikes from your car battery could damage your devices. It's impossible to say what you'll get since so many manufacturers sell products like this. We chose to source from a reputable dealer, Monoprice, and have manually checked over 100 samples to make sure that they are all regulating properly. Our customers have the option to supply their own Car Adapter if they wish and about half have done so.

You can pledge here: http://kck.st/vjPlpE
After the Kickstarter completes you can purchase from us directly at http://www.findmycarsmarter.com

I've lost my car for hours once too at Woodstock 99. Try finding your car among 200,000 others crammed together in a mile square grass field with nothing to use for location reference and in the dark. Granted, it was only one time. Our solution is really intended to help people in their everyday life, running quietly in the background and there to give you directions when you want them.

Yes, this feature has been available on stand-alone GPS devices for a while, but I'd venture to say that more people carry around an iPhone 4S these days than a dedicated GPS device.

It's actually not possible on iOS to save your GPS location when you unplug from power. You can certainly get the power state when your application is running in the foreground, but iOS is very restrictive about background processes. The only allowed background processes must be for the explict purposes of VOIP, location tracking or audio playback and now with iOS5, Bluetooth LE. Plus wouldn't this mean if you charged your phone at work, you'd lose where your car was parked?

@steve Thank you for seeing the value of our system! You're absolutely right about the early adopter cost, Bluetooth LE devices are just starting to trickle into the market now and no one is producing these Bluetooth LE devices in volume, so there is no economy of scale. We are actually re-purposing a "development kit", BlueGiga BLED112, for our system. If you send a little time searching you'll find similar development systems typically go for around $100, TI CC2540DK-MINI for instance. The first consumer targeted devices are just now being announced at CES. The Cobra Tag G5 for instance will be selling for $60. We think at $20 & $5 S&H our system is pretty affordable. Although, we absolutely expect prices to drop significantly in a year or two when the OEMs, volumes, customers & applications all ramp up. We've already had a few OEMs contact us. Our application will support any Bluetooth Smart device and our system will be able to work with cheaper modules when they start hitting the market.

It uses low energy bluetooth 4.0. You can make your own. Your Cars BT probably doesn't come with it yet. If you make your own, you can download the App and use it , Last I checked it was in the Store for $.99

@gary We wish we could use Bluetooth Classic, this would make our market opportunity huge. It would mean anyone with an iPhone could use our system, not just iPhone 4S customers that then need to buy an extra device. But that's just not how iOS works, Apple does not allow developers access to Bluetooth Classic outside of the supported profiles. 

Yes, but the whole point in this idea is that it's automatic. "You just stop your car and walk away knowing that your location has been pinned." Are you going to remember to open the map, and put a pin at your location every single time you get out of your car? The one time you don't is when you'll forget where you parked...