Driving Sports

Dynolicious has just brought out a real-time automotive performance software application for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch units running the iPhone 2.0 software. Priced at just $12.99, the Dynolicious software offers a real-time readout of of acceleration, lateral G, braking G, standard drag racing timing, and it calculates wheel horsepower from the data you provide on weight and drivetrain efficiency.

The software achieves this remarkable feat using the built-in accelerometer in the iPod and iPhone. The accelerometer is the same feature that allows the i-device to "know" when you've turned it sideways or shaken it.

Here at Driving Sports HQ, we're all a bunch of big geeks, so we already had an assortment of iPhones and the latest generation of iPods laying around. We downloaded the Dynolicious software and installed it in moments - then we went to play on our lunch hour.

In our opinion, this application is well worth the money. From what we know about our cars, the Dynolicious offers an assessment that is accurate to within reasonable tolerances.

For example, we took Ryan's brand-new and bone-stock Mazda RX-8 out, and the Dynolicious says 175 wheel horsepower, and 0-60 in 7.25 with a 15.37 quarter mile. "That's about right," Ryan observed. "It's not like I was hammering on it." On the Forever MX-5 Project "Survivor" Miata, Dynolicious calculated wheel horsepower at 90, which seems a shade low compared to our actual dyno runs earlier this year, but the unit accurately timed our 0-60 performance at 12.62 seconds at a max of .60G acceleration for a 16.21 second 1/4 mile.

Hopefully in a future version, Dynolicious will tap the GPS on the iPhone 3G for even more accurate results and to datalog track sessions. Plus, the ability to save and view graphs would be nice. As it is, only key datapoints are saved, attached to cars saved in the system. Some sections of the program are also unusually slow, such as adding and editing cars in the "My Rides" section. But we figure for a 1.0 this is one of the most impressive and useful (for gearheads like us) iPhone applications yet.

As with any dyno tool, the main value of the Dynolicious is in comparisons before and after modifications to the same car. But the data has value for baseline comparisons, too. As such, we plan to use this software as another part of our auto review toolkit going forward. It doesn't replace professional tools just yet, but for the dirt-cheap price of $12.99, this is one hellaciously fun piece of software that allows you to test wild claims of acceleration and horsepower on the spot.

What do you get for your $12.99?

Specifically, the Dynolicious software gives you:

* 0-60 MPH
* Other Speed Tests (0-10 MPH through 0-100 MPH in 10MPH increments
* Quarter Mile Elapsed Time
* Quarter Mile Trap Speed
* Elapsed Time and Trap Speed for standard intervals (60', 330', 1/8 Mi, 1000')
* Lateral G's (current and peak)
* Braking G's (current and peak)
* Wheel Horsepower
* Estimated Engine Horsepower
* Realtime Speedometer and Graphs
* Realtime graphical skidpad display
* View results for latest test run or any saved run
* View averages based on vehicle, date, or modification
* Compare results between vehicles, dates, or before-and-after modifications