I have had my X-Drive unit from Mix Telematics for almost a month now, and so far am loving it. I was on leave for the last 2 weeks of the year, so I didn’t get to use it as much as I would have liked to, but now driving to work everyday, it is in full swing.
The unit hasn’t given me any hassles at all so far, the only issue that I have had seems to be the GSM signal interference on the unit’s speaker. I tried moving it a bit further away from the actual unit, but still getting it. I suspect this could be an 1D10t error on my part, and may just need to move it further away. One day :)
Other than that, it all seems to be running smoothly. I was generously given 5000 credits from the guys at Mix Telematics, and they looks like they will last for a quiet a while. I do an average of about 64km to work and back everyday, and I still have about 4600 credits left after about 1.5 weeks of work. I have also been driving around a bit on the weekends, so I also need to take that into consideration.
The awesome thing about the X-Drive unit is that it is all pre-paid. So you can choose when you want to top up your credits. You can also choose how often you want your device to update once you have topped up your account. You can choose between 15seconds(or evry 1km)/30seconds (or every 5km) or 45 seconds(or every 10km) of updating. The credits work out reasonably cheap from R9 for 90 credits to R500 for 6350 credits. I worked it out, and if I had to buy a R500 credit that would last me about 3 or 4 months, which really isn’t too bad.
The other cool thing I have used on the website is the alerts. I set up the max speeding to be 120km/h, and the other night coming home from work, I was a little heavy on the pedal, and the next thing my phone popped up with an SMS to tell me that I had exceeded the speed limit. Needless to say, I have increased the limit ;)
Something else that caught me off guard was that you can set a “restriction” to alert you when the car is being used between a specific time. So I set mine up between 23:00 and 06:00. The other morning, at about 5:30am, my phone starts beeping again, to tell me that my car was in use between the restricted times. After my heart doing a small skip & jump, I remembered that my wife decided to go for a walk at 5:30 on the beach :)
All in all the system has been great so far. I will be doing a couple of posts going into details on the website and the iPhone app. If you would like to get a feel of how the whole thing works, log into the demo account on the X-Drive website(http://www.X-Drive.co.za). You can log in with the username “guestuser” and “password” as the password. From there you will be able to see the functionality of the site and the different preferences you can choose. You can also follow a test vehicle and run the different reports that are available.
If you have a X-Drive unit, leave a comment below, and let me know what you like or dislike about the unit. I am keen to hear what everyone else thinks about it.
