about a year and a half ago I brought to you guys a little device called the car
lock it plugs into your obd2 slot lets you track a vehicle in case of theft or
making sure juniors not speeding out when he's out with his friends and it
also did checkups on your vehicle make sure your your 12-volt batteries doing
good and it even worked on a Tesla and works with pretty much any vehicle that
uses the obd2 slot well car lock has approached me they loved my review about
their car lock device and they said hey would you like to give the new car lock
portable they try and give it a little review so we have here the car lock
portable now the difference is the original car lock has to plug into an
obd2 slot that's for its power and to monitor the vehicle this one is battery
powered so let's take a look a little bit different you can see there's no
obd2 slot it has a 2600 milliamp hour battery and
it can go for as much as 14 days on a single full charge monitoring a vehicle
now the nice thing about this because it does not require the obd2 slot you can
use it to track a trailer you could toss it in the car still track a car and
that's another feature I should touch on is it has a SOS button see that nice
little square button right there if you press and hold it which I just did it
will automatically send an emergency alert to whatever phone in that the car
lock app is on to alert it that there's an emergency
now one thought I was going to do is I can shove this in Geno's backpack that's
my youngest's currently youngest got another one on the way and I can see
where he is if he's going for a walk with his friends on her bike ride
walking home from school and if there's a problem he can press the button my
phones instantly alerted to where he is I can go and check him other thing since
it's battery-powered the vehicle doesn't even have to be on stress-free traveling
you could toss this in a suitcase when you're traveling and say you arrive at
your destination but your suitcase is missing well where is it well you can
say oh I'm in San Francisco why is my suitcase in Beijing let's see uh well
I'd say 14 days of battery life is pretty darn good works with Apple or
Google or Android go in the Google Play Store
it comes with your first month of service for free and it's less I think
it was less than $10 a month if you buy a year's worth of monitoring prepaid and
it's pretty cool it's gsm-based it's got a little SIM
card comes with the same card right there it charges via USB and enough
talking let's actually check it out now your I saw the SOS button it's got three
lights for power cell phone and GPS now it pulls the cell cell tower and the GPS
every 15 to 30 seconds roughly and this cuts down considerably on battery usage
if someone presses the SOS button no matter what it will connect and send
that that notification usually I was playing around with it took about five
or ten seconds for that notification to come through to my phone another power
buttons on the top so you just press and hold turn it on press and hold shut it
off took about four hours from 100% dead to about I thinking about 96% when I
took it off the charger and what's more is if you're gonna be tracking something
like a trailer like in my case I I have travel trailers that I rent out on
outdoorsy and RV share and occasionally it'd be nice to know where there
if they're going out of state I prefer track since this is Jess I'm very
compatible with a lot of networks and
this open here this is the car locks magnet attachment for things like
trailers and I haven't taken out of the package yet but I have been playing with
the magnets and these maintenance are not your normal little cheap
refrigerator magnets these are neodymium
so neodymium magnets even has some little little spacers in there if you
need some more extra padding and the car lock slides in there but to cover on and
O two little screws in the packaging so the cover will actually screw shut and
it will stick and with these neodymium magnets let's see whoops didn't have the
screws on there cuz we're still playing right now because we're still playing
around a bit but these buggers are strong these will most likely not pop
off as you're going down a bumpy road and I will be giving that a try too
but let's take a look at the app so you guys stop looking at me look at my phone
so now we are looking at the car lock app and so as you can see it's showing
the approximate location put that up on the onto the dashboard there so it gives
approximate location now when you hit SOS the location gets even more accurate
and you can really zoom in and get pretty darn close so we're just sitting
in the in the street here now you got a few different functions you got the lock
function which kind of Geo fences where where it's located and if
the device travels outside that location you will get notified so just for
example let's say I have this in Geno's backpack and he's at school and I'm
sorry I lock him at school now if he travels outside that that school
perimeter I will get notified immediately so that's a very neat
feature there as you can see I'm impressed this little picture of a car
with arrow pointing down that zooms in no matter where you're looking phone
kind of like centers on that GPS and the upper left there is a center on that
shows my location navigate to the car but we're not going
to do that because I'm sitting in the car so let's look at no I did get 100%
you can see the battery level of the car lock portable and you can see total
distance and time and let's take a look you got we got logs SOS buttons pressed
you can see I was playing around with it and doing some fun stuff smart lock I
got a look into this a little more but they also have a little little Bluetooth
tag and yes and you can also lock to certain locations and then you can set
some some other other settings here now as a backup if you're if you're
traveling outside someplace that doesn't have data access you can purchase and
you get I think 2020 sms's if you purchase a a yearly subscription and
what happens is is if the car lock or your phone does not have a data at
signal but you do have signal forgetting say a text message instead of notifying
you through the app you will get a text message inset instead you can turn off
smart lock harsh driving lets you be notified about driving behavior such as
an usually fast acceleration hard and sudden stop
sharp breaking I'm gonna use this for tracking my trailer
speeding 81 miles an hour now my renter's I tell them they should not
exceed 65 with my trailers increases fuel consumption and greatly starts to
increase bearing temperatures so we're gonna set that to 70 miles an hour so
I'll get notified if they go over at or over 70 and then profile you can see my
the first one there is Tesla s that was my my obd2 car lock the original one I
tested out and I was actually using that to track grandpa and the ex-wife's cars
of course with with with their 100% consent but I just named this one the 90
D you can add vehicles now I'm not going to go through the whole set up the
original set up you get a card in the Box you go if you've never used car lock
before you go to the your URL on the card and then you just enter in the
serial number and the Vice ID and you can create your account and you're all
set to go you log in to your account on the phone or tablet app and that's it
you're all set to go if you have an existing car lock account do not I found
do not use the URL in the on the card instead go straight to your app log in
go to profile and it will have and click Add vehicle I found it worked a lot
smoother and there's a lot less hassle with the system accepting that minor
details but I mean if you don't have an account go with the URL if you do have
an account log in and add it via the app so we're gonna go out next and we're
going to shove this little bugger onto my trailer we're going to do that a
little later cuz I want to fully charge it before my trailer goes out and that
way I will be able to track where my trailer is going this weekend it's got a
two day rentals so he's picking it up this afternoon
so let's move on over to that okay so I got the car lock portable it's a screwed
in and secured in here and just for fun we're gonna go real quick over to the
beater Pontiac here in Charlie's Lerner car oh look at that oh man yeah that's
got that's a strong strong magnet on here so huh
here is my brand new 2019 ePro customer will be here in about five minutes to
pick it up so we're going to attach this bugger on here but first just straight
up lift that is some strong magnet that's so we're gonna rock it on now if
you want to lift off it's easier to rock it
damn okay so
we are going to put this how about right there between those two bolts I want to
try and keep it somewhat angled towards the sky you know visible you know to the
sky because better GPS lock and there we go and once he's got it and drives off
we'll just take a little little look-see on the actual tracking so that it is
okay so I set a geofence last night with the lock so that way I got an alert when
the trailer started moving and we're going to shut that off clear vehicle
moved alert will clear that and yes I have the renters permission I'm not
showing his destination or where he started from so that way you know
protect his privacy he's just going down the interstate now I'm just pretty much
passing downtown Milwaukee right now so we're gonna unlock and right now it was
pretty cold last night about 31 32 degrees Fahrenheit he's traveled about
on this his total trip battery is still 93% after it's been 24 hours now so
vehicles moved it's in motion now so we can go through and we can see updates
about every 30 seconds or so and he's actually getting ready to pass the
Milwaukee Brewers stadium our Mitchell Park quaint no nuts
Milwaukee my own Oh Miller Park is there on the left-hand side so he'll be
getting to Miller Park in about one minute there but it's letting me it's
keeping me synched with with with the trailer there
see tell me vehicle moved so it lets me see where it is going I'd say that's
pretty pretty cool got a little further there oh there we go in the top speed 61
miles per hour which is pretty much keeping up with traffic through
Milwaukee County it's a 55 speed limit but there we go
and then alert it alerted me it buzzed me on my phone once it left that
geo-fenced locked area so when I turn that on
it locks it within that radius and there you have it this is the car lock
portable extremely impressed now where am I you might think I'll show
you zoom out I am currently I am currently literally right here there's
my trailer Oh passing the casino there you go if
you are interested in purchasing a car lock portable or card lock the standard
one that plugs into the OBD obd2 slot please see the links below