I made that image above extra big to drive the point home. If this "Smart Tracker" is smart, then I am a rocket scientist. Just ask anyone who knows me, and they will impress upon you how ridiculous that concept is. I went to art school, for God's sake!
The story behind my purchase of this piece of motorcycle gadgetry is worth mentioning. In 2019, if you don't already know, I was in a bad motorcycle accident. I was in the ICU, and my family and friends had to wait out 30 days of induced sleep, toiling with the uncertainty of my recovery or lack thereof. While I was in the hospital, my good buddy Chris "Freaking" Earl and his better half had the idea to create some way for loved ones to be notified immediately if a rider was to get into an accident. The idea was that the bike, or an app on your phone, or some other type of gadget would be able to understand that the bike went down and fire off a text SOS to let pre-determined emergency contacts know what happened.
Well, when I finally got out of the hospital, and we were all sitting around re-hashing the experience, Chris and Stacy (the shiny side of the coin of Earl) brought the idea up to me. We started spit-balling ways to pull off something like that, and we quickly began adding features to make it into something that would be an excellent product for any motorcyclist to use.
The conversation gave way to hours of competitive research and the creation of a list of features ranging from totally practical all the way to probably impossible. I found that there were many accident detection/SOS products already available and many patents on systems that are not yet on the market. However, there was nothing that provided the whole gamut of features that we were discussing, and many products relied on cell service or had other shortcomings that left a hole in the market for our idea.
I was starting to think pretty seriously about developing this product, but life got in the way, and the idea wound up back-burnered a bit. Then, one day I saw an advertisement on Facebook for the Vigo Smart tracker by Smart Turn System. I said to myself: "Holy Crap!" I was pretty sure that that ad popped up because of Facebook's Nazi spy system. It heard me via my own phone's microphone and hunted down that ad to try to make me buy the damn thing. At first, I thought it was pretty neat, but then I started looking at the list of features, and boy did I get creeped out. Did Facebook or Apple sell Smart Turn Signal my idea (mine and Chris and Stacy's)?? I could not believe it. This thing was almost EXACTLY what we had devised! As I read, the list of features where driven home like a pile driver to the skull. From their literature:
1) SOS Call:
Accidents never sleep. Vigo will share your precise location with your designated contact if you have an accident.
-Check: the main feature we first discussed.
2) 24/7 CONTROL
Get alerted of any unauthorized movement of your motorcycle. 24/7 in-app control over the status and location of your motorcycle.
-Check: We would also make it a theft prevention/recovery device.
3)RIDES OVERVIEW
Rides get automatically saved in the mobile app. You can easily share them with your friends if you want.
-Check: How cool would it be to combine our idea with a ride planning app like H-D Ride Planner or Scenic... apps we use daily.
One thing that I hate about all of the ride planning/ route tracking apps is that you have to turn them on. I thought that it would be fantastic for the device to automatically save the routes and pertinent information (distance, speed, etc) so that you could access them, follow them, and share them later.
I was pretty shocked that the device that we were planning had just hit the market, but at the same time, I figured that it was a no-brainer. We could not be (and obviously were not) the only motorcyclists who could put two-and-two together to make a cool gadget like that. So, I thought good for them. Let me give this thing a go. So, I bought it. Dang! Facebook did get me to buy something! That is so frustrating.
When this happened, I had been following Smart Turn Systems for a while. I had been waiting for them to make their self-canceling turn signals work with my Ducati models. I would even prod them on Facebook from time to time trying to get them on the ball and provide me a kit for my Ducs. Also, Chris "Freaking" Earl had purchased and was using their smart brake module, which flashes when the bike slows down... no need to touch the brakes to signal to the person behind you that you are slowing down. So, I had a coupon in my inbox at any rate for a discount on their products. I put it to use on the Vigo Smart Tracker.
I purchased the device and used my coupon. The thing is listed on their site for $149.00 as we speak, but I am pretty sure I did not spend more than around $70.00 with whatever coupon I had. I should add here that STS is always sending coupons to registered email addresses, and although they always make it out to be a special offer since you are such a special person, they do it a lot and for everyone. So, the moral of the story is never pay full price for one of their products. That's not the only reason you should not pay full price... but we are getting to that. In addition to the cost of the unit, I paid for a year of subscription, which was about $56. I didn't think that was a ton to pay between the two costs. Also, I planned to install it on my new 2021 Kawasaki Ninja H2 when it arrives. The H2 is not a cheap bike, so I figured this would be a perfect way to feel like my new "investment" (ahem, cough, cough..."investment") would be protected.
So, weeks went by, and after a delay at customs (supposedly), the tracker arrived. Months more past and the H2 finally arrived. I went on about setting up the app. Pretty much immediately, I ran into a snafu with the app. I was trying to register, and I could not get past the page where you input your name and phone number. The screen just would not let me "submit." It did not freeze, as I could still add or delete letters and numbers, but it would not submit. Finally, after contacting support and playing with it for a while... trying, and trying again, I finally realized what was wrong. I had the telephone number format incorrect. I did not add a "1" for my country. Once I realized this was the problem, it ticked me off. What ticked me off was not that you had to add the "1" for the country, but that the system did not show me what I was inputting wrong by turning the field red, or in any other way... like with a warning that says: "Hey shmuck, put a country code in." That was my first sign that I was dealing with a low-budget, second-rate product, but I tried to set that aside and move on without prejudice.
The device is a relatively small unit that you can see above. It has a short pigtail that connects to a lead that you bolt to the battery terminals.
I thought that it should work well to attach the lead to the battery, then "mount the device above the battery with zip ties. This would have worked beautifully, but then I read the instructions. The instructions say that the device should NOT be installed "under the rider", and also that the Vigo Smart Tracker has to be facing forward, not aligned horizontally. What? Yes. I am not making this up. So, I would up routing it to the front of the bike along the fairing interior. Luckily it has a pretty long lead.
What a great spot this would have been...
Routing from under the seat to the front of the bike... trying to hide the wire.
See here the lead running on top of the plastic piece that it eventually wound up running below. You can see the small red arrow pointing to the connector that attaches to the short pigtail on the device, and the green arrow shows the direction that the device was mounted in and along the fairing with double -sided tape. The device must be facing forward supposedly.
I got the Vigo installed and turned on the bike. Immediately I got an alert via the app that told me that the bike was activated, and I had three seconds to acknowledge that it was in a safe location with me. I thought that was pretty cool, and I established that my garage was home right there and then. Once you do that, then the app shows this for status when the bike is home safe:
This screenshot is actually from after having ridden it, not the initial screen from when I started the bike the first time... but you get the idea.
I went on to ride the bike, and I was pretty impressed after the first ride out. It tracked my ride down the street.
However, in retrospect, I only looked at it quickly. I did not realize that it only tracked me one way. There is also a weird little floating green line that is not connected to the other line. I can promise you that my H2, although fast, is not capable of flying or hop-scotching, soooo... Also, it looks like the app just decided that I must have gotten home "somehow," so it threw down that dotted grey line. That is not the route I took.
As I used the app over the next few days, I did some riding with my father. We rode from one place to another, stopping and shutting off the bikes as we did. We stopped at Euro Cycles in Daytona, and then we went to Ormond for lunch, for instance. I noticed that the Vigo would only track one or two legs of the day. It would maybe follow from my house to Euro Cycles and from Ormond to back home, but left out the Euro Cycles to Ormond leg.
This was annoying.
When I had the bike home in the garage, though, I did find it amusing that I could see both the bike's location and my location in the app, and I could get the app to navigate me through the house to the bike. I thought it was cool that the location tracking was that precise. Ultimately, I was still happy with it, so I decided to contact tech support to help with the one issue I was having.
Well... I submitted this ticket:
If you can't zoom in to the above pic of my email, this is what it says:
My tracker is not working well at all. It misses entire sections/legs of my rides. If I ride to three places and stop at each, it often only tracks one leg... from one stop to another, then none of the other trips. So far, I'm finding this thing pretty unreliable. It is mounted on the side fairing of my 2021 Kawasaki Ninja H2 in the proper direction. It is not under my body or under metal. What is the problem?
Matt Ramieri
Founder
All Riders: IMC
Now... I submitted this ticket on 6/2/2021, and today as I write this is 6/30/21. Would you believe that they never responded to this ticket? Well, they never did. I can say that when I emailed them about the previous issue I had when trying to register, the auto-response said that 'due to high volume of requests," it may take 10 days or more to get a response. Oh, and there was this gem as well from back when they emailed me about the customs delay on delivery:
I cannot imagine why Mark has such a LONG list of emails that need answering. Could it be that it is because the product doesn't work? I really am trying to stay awesome here, Mark, but your product is making that difficult.
While I was waiting to hear back, I thought I'd give resetting the device a try. There is no obvious way to reset it, and since I didn't hear back from HQ, I thought I would unplug it and plug it back in. I did that, and kept riding, and kept experiencing the same issues.
The issues continued until one day; things got even more interesting. I went on a one-and-a-half-hour ride from my place down to Marion county and back. I guess I did turn the bike off once to get gas. Then I rode home. The smart tracker not only did not track my whole route, but it left the bike down past Paisley!
This is the only part of the whole trip that it captured. It should have been a big loop, not a straight line. You could say, well maybe it broke the trip up into more than one listing like it had before, but there is only one listing for the day of the ride: Wed 6/2/21:
Once I discovered that the bike hadn't tracked the ride home, I checked to see the status on the bike on the app while the bike was sitting in my garage. There, on the app, it has my bike still waaay out past Paisley. Look at this:
Now, anyone who knows me can tell you that there's no way I'd leave my brand new bike 50 miles away! The bike was only feet away from me when I captured this image of the app. I'd call that an epic fail. Wouldn't you? So, then it dawned on me... what if the Vigo "Smart" tracker fell off on the ride?! I feverishly removed the bolts from the plastic fairing cover and checked to see if the device was still there. Yep, still there.
So, still not having heard back from STS regarding my previous email, I wrote another one. This one a little more strongly positioned. I told them about the issue and that I had lost confidence in the device. I told them I wanted a refund for the product and that I was canceling my subscription. I got no response, of course. As I mentioned above, I have not heard back from either attempt to contact them. The Vigo Smart Tracker supposedly has a 24-month warranty, but if the company that supports it won't acknowledge that you exist, I guess that warranty is basically junk.
I'd say that this device is a complete waste of time and resources. It is one thing for a product to fail or not work well if there is an upstanding company behind it that is willing to make right any wrongs. That is not the case here, apparently, so my recommendation is to avoid STS and their products like the plague. I can also attest that Chris"freaking" Earl's "Smart" brake light module failed after just a few months of use.
So, a giant set of thumbs down with a duce on top for STS and their Vigo"Smart" tracker.
