Volkswagen Group of America is the North American operation headquarters and subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, which facilitates the U.S. operations of many brands of vehicles.

Car-Net was introduced by Volkswagen in 2013 with features that allow Volkswagen owners to easily access their vehicle with a mobile device, along with other features designed to improve the driving experience.

With nearly 5.25 million accidents per year in the United States, finding ways to encourage safe driving habits is an ongoing challenge. There is a need to encourage drivers to drive safely.

Our Car-Net DriveView Social Competition App is a social media mobile application that allows users to compete against each other by driving safely. Users who drive the safest are placed at the top of the leaderboards for other users to view.

Drivers achieve these safety scores by completing objectives relating to safe driving. With our application, users track their driving achievements by simply using their vehicle. A user’s safety score is calculated using these achievements as well as vehicle data.

To promote competition between users, leaderboards allow users to track how well they are doing compared to other drivers in their region.

Our application also allows users to filter who they are competing against. These filters include an overall distance driven by other drivers, other users’ overall safety scores and a radius of other drivers near them. In addition to those filters, users may also check how they stack up based on the current day, week, month or year to see how they have progressed against other users.

Our Android application is written in Java and uses Firebase for user authentication. The back end is written in Python with Flask libraries to communicate with the app through HTTP messages.