The LiveViewGPS Live Trac EZ ($169 direct) is a real-time automotive GPS tracking device that plugs right into your car's ODB-II port, like the CarMD diagnostic tool. With the Live Trac EZ , you can configure alerts for speed, ignition, and location zones, and view historical location data with satellite, bird's eye, and hybrid map views, as well as generate reports. It's not perfect, but it does exactly the job it's designed to do, whether it's for company use monitoring employees or for more illicit purposes.
Service and Setup
To use the Live Trac EZ, you also need to sign up for the company's service, which costs $29.95 per month on a no-contract basis for 10-second updates, or $39.95 per month for 5-second updates. There's also an activation fee of $19.95 per device. This can get expensive quickly, as you can imagine, especially if you're outfitting a fleet of company vehicles. To get started, head to www.liveviewgps.com and click the Activate button; the company only processes activations weekdays from 8am to 4pm PST. Processing can take a few hours. Once your unit is activated, you'll get a username and password.
The Live Trac EZ is a small plastic square that measures roughly 2 by 1.5 by 0.8 inches (HWD) and weighs about an ounce. The side of the device contains green, blue, and red LED lights. They blink at varying speeds to show power, cellular signal status, and satellite signal status. There's also a microUSB port, but you don't use it for anything?it's intended for troubleshooting only.
Installation takes just a few seconds, and consists mainly of figuring out where the car's ODB-II port is. Any passenger car or truck built after 1996 will have this port; it's usually located underneath the dashboard on the driver's side, and is often used for diagnostics and for connecting the car to emissions testing computers. Once you find it, plug in the Live Track EZ, and that's it?you're done.
The Nissan Sentra I tested with had its ODB-II port underneath the steering column and to the left, like most cars, except that this one faced straight down. As a result, you could easily see the Live Trac EZ sticking out underneath the dashboard, and could even knock into it with your left leg while driving. Just getting into the car once or twice, I doubt someone would see it unless they were explicitly looking for it, but standing outside with the driver's side door open, it was fairly obvious. Having said that, actually using this device to track someone without their knowledge strikes me as extremely creepy.
Monitoring, Alerts, and Reporting
So how does the Live Trac EZ work? Once you're up and running, and the Live Trac EZ is installed in the car, you can view the vehicle's location at any time by logging into the website with your name and password. The device transmits location data every 10 seconds whenever the car is moving at least 3mph in a given direction. With the ignition off, it sends an update every 30 minutes.
Once logged into the website, you'll see a smoothly animated street and satellite view map showing the car's current location. You can add weather and traffic control, show recently driven routes, and generate reports. You can also configure alerts that send email and SMS notifications. For example, Speed Alerts let you set a threshold that sends an alert whenever the vehicle exceeds, say, 65mph. You can do the same for preconfigured routes, as well as whether the ignition is started or stopped, or whenever the car enters a predefined zone on the map, which you can set up by pinning various points.
The Reporting section has a bit of an old-school Windows feel to it, with plenty of wasted space and too many confirmation buttons. But you do get detailed results, including a speed graph, time stamps, and compass headings, although the latter are coded as 360-degree numbers instead of North or East, which would have been easier to understand. A mobile app is also available for both iOS (iPhone or iPad) and Android devices, if you'd rather check location info on the go instead of while seated at a computer.
Historical Playback and Conclusions
My favorite feature, though, is History Playback, which walks you through a set time period. This way you don't have to watch the map in real-time to see where the car is going; you can just check in later. This worked great in our tests; you can adjust the speed it runs at, and it displays a thick red line over the map showing where the car has been. For commercial use, a route planner lets you define multiple delivery points, which you can then look at in progress to make sure your drivers are sticking to the assigned schedule.
One other quirk: When I was done, I had a really hard time removing the Live Trac EZ from the ODB-II port. It was stuck in so tight that the entire plastic housing gave way first, leaving the exposed circuit boards sticking out of the bottom of the Sentra's dashboard. After about 10 minutes of careful reassembly and strong pulling, I finally got the device out. This could be specific to the car I tested it with, but I can say I've never had this much trouble pulling a device from an ODB-II port before.
Overall, the Live Trac EZ does a solid job, delivering accurate tracking results and useful trip data. The website is easy to use, but I saw a few graphical glitches; for example, centering the map around the car icon never worked properly, and sometimes the page froze, which I could only fix by logging in again. But this is a fairly new and specific product, so some refinement issues are forgiveable in our view. More pressing is the cost, which is okay for one vehicle for a few months, but can get out of hand quickly once you begin equipping a fleet of cars or trucks. The LandAirSea SilverCloud offers a smoother interface and faster updates, but it starts at $369. If you don't need real-time monitoring and just want something that tracks data you can view later on, the LandAirSea Tracking Key does the job for just $179, although you'll need to retrieve the device from the vehicle and plug it into your computer before you can see anything.
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