Hello, I’m Angie Shields, and I’m part of the engineering team here at Smartcar. One of my favorite parts of working on this product is that we’re constantly asking ourselves: How do we make life easier for developers like us?
Over the past few months, our team has been heads-down rethinking the very first moments of the developer journey with Smartcar. I’ve been through that process myself countless times—signing up for a new API, only to spend hours wrestling with SDKs, authentication flows, and data models before I can even see a single response. It’s frustrating, and honestly, it slows down the excitement of building something new.
That’s what led us to create what we call our Data Delivery First approach. The idea is simple but powerful: instead of making you set up all the plumbing before you see anything, we flip it. We deliver real vehicle data right away.
Here’s how it works in practice:
- Connect a vehicle directly from the dashboard.
- Create a webhook integration from our list of available vehicle signals.
- Select the signals you care about, and customize the webhook payload.
- Subscribe individual vehicles or even your whole fleet automatically.
The first time I saw live vehicle data streaming into a webhook within just a few minutes of setup, I had that “wow” moment. It felt like we’d unlocked something developers (including me) have been wishing for—proof of concept without the usual roadblocks.
And this matters because I know how easy it is to lose momentum during prototyping. By putting data delivery first, we’re:
- Reducing friction – no boilerplate code before you can test.
- Speeding up onboarding – live data in under 10 minutes.
- Enabling rapid iteration – experiment quickly with different signals.
For me, this is one of those features that makes our mission feel very real. Smartcar is all about unlocking freedom of movement for everyone, and with this change, we’re helping developers get from idea to prototype faster than ever.
I’m genuinely excited to see what you’ll build with it. If you want to try it out, you can sign up for a Smartcar account and start experimenting today.
