Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Smartcar does not build applications ourselves. Rather, we provide the building blocks that our customers need in order to build applications for a variety of use cases.

Yes. For instance, if you own a VW, you will need to have Car-Net activated in the US or WeConnect in Europe. You can read more about connected service subscriptions here.

Take a look at our Global Compatibility page for the latest information on where Smartcar works.

Smartcar is always expanding and working hard to ensure supported countries are stable and reliable. If your country is not currently supported, but you think we’ll be a good fit for your use case, schedule a demo and let’s see how we can help you!

Smartcar Connect is avaibale in English, Danish, German, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish providing vehicle owners a native experience as they onboard vehicles to your platform.

Smartcar will always try to pull the latest data point from any given vehicle. Each API response includes an sc-data-age header that will contain the timestamp of when that data was last saved.

Although each OEM saves data at different times, the data age header should not be older than the last time the vehicle was used.

Smartcar is compatible with 161 million vehicles across the US, Canada and Europe.

United States
Smartcar is compatible with 29 car brands in the United States.

Europe
Smartcar is compatible with 19 car brands in Europe.

Canada
Smartcar is compatible with 21 car brands in Canada.

If your make isn’t supported…

We work hard to ensure that supported brands are stable and reliable, which takes time. If you don’t see your make on our compatibility page but you would like it to be, reach out to support@smartcar.com to see how you can help speed up the process!

If we support your make, but not your model…

We might just need to do some additional testing. Sign up to our research fleet and we’ll reach out to see what we can do for you!

If we support your make, model, but not your year…

The majority of automakers only started adding internet connectivity to their cars around 2014. If you’re able to access your car through a smartphone application and believe it should be supported, reach out to us and we’ll be happy to take a look.

While on-board diagnostics dongles are versatile and useful for tracking and diagnostics of many kinds, they are far from ideal when it comes to mileage verification. They can be inaccurate, inconvenient, expensive and unreliable.Smartcar is only one example of a pure software alternative that uses API technology to offer the perfect mileage verification solution to auto insurance companies. Compared with traditional OBD-II devices, our API is accurate, cost efficient and tamper-resistant.

You can read more about why using our API is a great choice on our blog.

In the event that we recieve a response from the OEM after the connection is closed, we will show the error code and error type we would have responded with on the Dashboard if the connection had been kept open.