Your phone buzzes.Is it important?
You do not know. So you ignore it, or you look at your phone while driving.
NotifyDrive+ puts WhatsApp, Email, Any Notification on your car screen and reads them out loud.
The hardware works. It is in my car.
The video is the actual prototype in an actual Tesla. Press play.
A USB dongle.
Setup, start to finish.
Plug it in
It goes into a USB port in the car and stays there.
Pair it to your phone and your car
Both sides connect to the dongle and it bridges them, passing everything through. Calls, music, everything else works the way it did before.
Pick your apps
Messages and notifications from the apps you choose show up on the screen and get read out.
I built this because I kept missing my wife's WhatsApp messages while I was driving.
In 2021 I wrote an Android app for this. A few thousand people bought Messaging Tesla, then Google restricted the permission it needed and my updates stopped going out. People kept emailing me about it from Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, until today. So I built the dongle instead.
What it costs
One dongle at the lowest price of the campaign.
This is not a mass-produced dongle. This is a small run that I design, build, flash and pack myself, and the firmware behind it took years to work out.
Estimated delivery May 2027. Ships from Canada, duties not included.
Before you ask
Does it work on iPhone?
Yes. Every solution before this was Android only, because iOS does not give apps the permissions this needs. The dongle works on the Bluetooth side instead, so notifications from any app show up and get read aloud on iPhone. The limit is replies: Apple gives no way to send a reply into a third-party app, so replying from the car is Android only. I would rather say that now than have you find out in May.
Why not just use a free Android app?
There are Android apps that do part of this, and people in the forums use them. They have two problems, and they are the two I spent my time solving. They have to be your default messaging app, which is the same restriction that killed my own app. And when you reply from the car, the reply goes out as an SMS, so someone who wrote to you on WhatsApp gets a text back. The dongle does not need to be your default anything, because the message is injected on the Bluetooth side, and on Android your reply goes back into WhatsApp, in the right conversation.
Will it work in my car, or only Tesla?
Tested on Tesla. The underlying channel is hands-free SMS over Bluetooth, a standard car profile called MAP, so it should work in any car that already reads texts out loud.
Can two phones be connected at once?
A Tesla connects to one Bluetooth device at a time. Personal or work, pick one. The dongle sits between your phones and the car, so architecturally it can hold both and pass calls and messages through from either. This is the one thing that cannot be done in software on any platform, because the limit is in the car and not the phone.
When does it ship?
May 2027, six months after the campaign ends. What is left is rewriting the firmware properly for production, a real PCB, and the enclosure. That is what the campaign pays for. Every production run I have done has taken three months minimum, and the rewrite comes first, so I would rather give a date I can hold.
Where does it ship from?
Canada. Customs and duties vary by country and are not included in the pledge price.
Stop wondering what that buzz was
Every notification you care about, on the screen and read out loud. Leave your email and I will write to you the day the campaign opens, or follow the page and Kickstarter will tell you itself.