SaferCar

• Free

Last verified 31 Jul 2026

2.8 113 ratings · App Store

1. 3/5Open in background for notifications?

   What a joke. Makes me think they are collecting some other sort of data. Shouldn’t be that difficult to send a notification without the app needing to be running in background. Many other apps do it just fine. Edit: developer responded stating this was for security purposes, and thus I’ve bumped up my stats as I value security. This makes sense to me as all the personal information can be kept on the client-side (iPhone). It would be cool I think to have a server-side system that can check once a day for any users that subscribe to such system. For privacy considerations, I’m sure an randomly generated unique id for each app user and hashed values may offer some protection.

   Skylais1 · 31 Jul 2026

2. 4/5Well it recognized *my* VIN...

   There seem to be an awful lot of complaints on here about the app not taking people's VINs, but it took the VIN for my (not extremely common) car just fine. I wonder if it would help others to do what I did, which was to pull the car up first by year, make and model and then put the VIN in the box that appears below the car for that purpose. Anyway, so far so good. And I don't think I'm terribly concerned about the app having to run in the background because anytime I go to quit all the apps on my phone I find I have about 50 of them running in the background already, some that I haven't used in a month or more, so adding one more to that list doesn't seem a big deal to me.

   plaintiger · 31 Jul 2026

3. 1/5Unable to enter a VIN as promised. Deleting app.

   Update: There’s more at stake when having to keep an app operating in the background than how often it communicates with home. And the excuse the developer gives for requiring keeping the app open doesn’t hold water. Also, the VIN entry fail is persistent and calling them as instructed by the error popup was a waste of time bc I had to leave a message and no-one returned my call. Original: I’m also not interested in an app that requires that it constantly be open and running in the background for it to work. By the way, it doesn’t work then either. A waste of time for the user and an example of what gives government agencies an image of ineptitude.

   harley&me · 31 Jul 2026

4. 2/5Nice when it works

   This app has so much potential, but as usual with any app for a government agency, they’ve completely fumbled any opportunity to make this work. I manage a fleet of almost 200 vehicles. About half of them are light duty vehicles. This app WAS very useful at keeping track of recalls for those vehicles when they came up. It would be very difficult otherwise to keep track of that otherwise. With recent updates, they have limited how many vehicles you can track to 10, so I can’t add any new vehicles. Please remove the limit like it was before. Also the app is very slow to respond when you’re trying to read details of an active recall. One more thing that’s annoying is that they require you leave the app open at all times so you can be notified of any new recalls.

   BroncoJewKing · 31 Jul 2026

5. 4/5Adjust notification time

   Will likely rate higher if I can figure how to change the notification time. Currently it’s alerting me at 5:30am which isn’t a concern most days when I’m already working but that isn’t the case everyday. Otherwise I really like the ease of the app!

   TopLeft · 31 Jul 2026

Privacy

• Data Not Linked to You — Analytics — Usage Data — Product Interaction Developer declared
• Data Not Linked to You — App Functionality — Diagnostics — Crash Data Developer declared
• Data Not Linked to You — App Functionality — Diagnostics — Other Diagnostic Data Developer declared
• Data Not Linked to You — Diagnostics Developer declared
• Data Not Linked to You — Usage Data Developer declared

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