Smartphones can make your life easier in a million different ways. Whether you are cooking, traveling, or shopping online, your smartphone can make each experience richer, quicker, and better.

Using your smartphone wisely while driving can help you bring down your car insurance rates by enabling you to drive safer and better. Your car insurance quotes will go down along with your driving time as your fuel efficiency goes up.

If you love driving and you can’t live without your smartphone, there are multiple ingenious ways to combine the two. Here are seven smartphone car apps that every driver should have:

• myCar Park
• Dynolicious
• aCar
• iGasUp
• RepairPal
• Motion X GPS Drive
• My Car Buddy

myCar Park

Essentially, myCar Park is nothing more than a glorified navigation app. Besides its handy navigational features, however, myCar Park’s real value is found in its ability to help you keep track of your car. If you have ever found yourself scratching your head wondering where you left your car this time, you’ll love myCar Park.

When you’ve finally found a great parking spot, use myCar Park to geotag your location, jot down some notes to help jog your memory, and even photograph the spot. Once you’ve completed your mission and are ready to return home, open the program and click the Walk to Car button. The app will show you the best way to get back to your parking spot.

Dynolicious

This app is perfect for real hardcore driving aficionados. Dynolicious uses your smartphone’s accelerometer to track your car’s stats while in transit. With Dynolicious, you have access to all the juicy information including acceleration time from zero to 60 miles per hour, horsepower, and lateral Gs.

This app comes with a history feature that can help you track the benefits of any upgrades you make to your ride. You can have readings made using either metric or imperial systems. Dynolicious also allows you to export your results, including technical information and even graphs, to Twitter, Facebook, and other online forums for bragging rights.

aCar

With a huge variety of options and features, this Android app is one of the best fuel mileage calculators available. aCar tracks your fuel costs and other expenses your vehicle incurs. You can separate business expenses and miles from personal expenses and miles. aCar will let you know when it’s time to take your car in for maintenance or repairs.

aCar specializes in its graphical displays of your information. You can view your fuel efficiency, expenses, miles, and a world of other details in practically any format imaginable including bar and line graphs. All data may be exported for further manipulation and study on a computer or laptop.

iGasUp

iGasUp is all about the prices of and locations for fueling up your automobile. It will use your smartphone’s embedded GPS system to hunt down and display for you the ten gas stations nearest to your current location. You can then view directions to each one as well as what the fuel will cost once you get there.

iGasUp uses information supplied by the Oil Price Information Service, one of the most trusted global sources for information concerning oil prices. There are more than 100,000 fueling stations registered with the app. You can sort results to display either the ones closest to you or the cheapest locations in your area.

RepairPal

We all have to take our precious babies to the dreaded mechanics for repairs occasionally. RepairPal will help to make that experience as painless and inexpensive as possible.

One of its most useful functions is its ability to find the closest roadside assistance services to your current location. It can also help you locate all the repair shops in your area and sort them by price or location.

If you know what specific repair your car needs, you can search for that specific repair in the different nearby mechanics shops and find the price estimate that is best suited to your wallet. If you need a tow, RepairPal can help you find a nearby tow truck.

Motion X GPS Drive

One of the most essential app functions when it comes to fusing smartphones and driving is that of getting directions. Motion X GPS Drive works exactly like a regular GPS system using all the latest map data and traffic information available for any location in the United States or Canada. With Motion X GPS Drive you simply have to input your destination and it will take you there step by step.

You can also post your current location to Facebook or find the best places to stop and eat along the way. Other programs can still be run in the background while you are using Motion X GPS Drive.

My Car Buddy

This upcoming app developed by an car insurance company professional is packed full of goodies. It includes a calculator to help you keep track of your fuel economy, a route finder to help you find the best routes to your destination, and a journey function to help you calculate various details about your trip including distance, average speed, and total trip time. Results can be viewed in both imperial and metric units.

Conclusion

When driving, your smartphone can be an essential companion to you. It can help you find the best route to your destination, avoid traffic, accidents, and speed traps, locate places to refuel, and even guide you to the best mechanics in town.