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Another roof, another proof.

livesince Jul 2026

Backseat

A road-trip app where everyone's a backseat driver.

backseatpro.com ↗
Two Backseat screens. Left, a day's timeline with Nigel's drive-time heads-up, a locked-in stay, and a stop up for a vote with a Dibs stamp. Right, the follower view with a live ETA, a photo Nigel has judged, and a tip from back home.

Everyone’s a backseat driver. That line came first, and the app grew around it.

A road trip is a group project where one person holds the wheel and everyone else holds opinions: where to stop, what to eat, which detour is worth it. Backseat gives those opinions somewhere to go instead of the back of the driver’s head.

What it does

Backseat turns a road trip into a game the whole car plays, and everyone back home gets to watch. You propose stops, vote on them, play power moves, and earn points along the way. Each person has a Mii-style avatar, and the trip stays in sync across every phone in real time.

Features

Planning

  • One-sentence trip setup. Describe the trip and the AI builds a day-by-day itinerary.
  • A living plan. Each day is a timeline of locked-in, proposed, and open slots, so it never hardens into a rigid itinerary.
  • Real drive times. Routing comes from Google, so ETAs and leave-by times are accurate.
  • Detour math. Every proposal shows its cost, like “+38 min, still make camp by 5.”

Deciding

  • Propose and vote. Anyone in the car can pitch a stop, meal, or detour. Polls close in minutes.
  • Dibs and Veto. Each crew member gets 2 Dibs and 1 Veto for the whole trip. A Dibs skips the vote. A Veto cancels anything, including a Dibs.
  • Visible counts. Everyone can see who still has a Dibs or a Veto left.
Two cards: a dinner stop claimed with a Dibs, and a midnight bowling detour vetoed and sent back to a vote.

Playing

  • Side quests. Photo challenges tailored to each stop, with Deep Cut bonuses for the obscure ones.
  • Wild Card. Spin it and let it pick the next detour.
  • A daily race. Points reset every morning, and topping the board by midnight banks a trophy.
  • Built-in balance. Underdogs earn double, and a runaway leader gets a Heat Check. Nobody runs away with it.
  • Morning check-in race. The first ones up and ready get bonus points.
  • Nigel’s badges. A second way to win the day.
The daily board: Mom leads with a Heat Check penalty, and the other three players carry crew and underdog multipliers.

Remembering

  • Live photo feed. The crew posts from the road, and home reacts and comments in real time.
  • Accurate photo tags. Each photo keeps the location and time it was actually taken.
  • Live GPS map. A real coastline map with the car on it.
  • Trip Yearbook. When it’s over, the app builds a keepsake with the route, photos, awards, and final standings.

Followers

  • One link, no account. Family back home can ride along with a live map and ETA, the photo feed, and the drama of every vote.
  • Everything but a vote. Followers can’t vote, but they can suggest stops, react, comment, and honk the car down the highway.
  • Local Expert badge. Earned for hometown tips the crew actually uses.

Nigel

Every trip has a narrator. Nigel is an AI character, a grizzled Australian roadie who spent the seventies on tour with rock bands and has seen worse than your playlist. He handles the logistics nobody wants to think about, like drive times and weather. He runs the morning briefings, deals out the challenges, and judges every photo with a star rating and a roast. You can also ask him things mid-trip. I wrote his persona document myself, and he’s the part that gives the app a personality instead of a feature list.

Nigel, a cartoon roadie in a red bandana with a lanyard, introduced as your trip's roadie.

How I’m building it

The loop is brainstorm, then design in Claude Design, then build in Claude Code. It runs on Firebase for the live sync and deploys to Vercel. All of it gets built from a Chromebook, which is either a constraint or a flex depending on the day.

The hardest bugs so far have been geographic. Map pins were landing in the wrong place until I found a flipped Y-axis in the coordinate projection, and the progress markers didn’t earn my trust until I wrote real test fixtures for how they interpolate along a route.

Six releases shipped in two weeks:

  • v1.0, First Departure (Jul 11): one-sentence trip setup, the shared timeline and feed, Dibs and Veto, and Nigel.
  • v1.1, Map and Memories (Jul 14): the coastline map with a live GPS car, and photo location and time.
  • v1.2, Daily Competition (Jul 15): daily trophies, badges, follower boards, and the check-in race.
  • v1.3, Nigel Sees All (Jul 19): Nigel’s photo judging, sign-in, and real routing.
  • v1.4, Bring the Crew (Jul 21): accounts, multiple trips, link invites, and private trips.
  • v1.5, The Recap (Jul 23): the end-of-trip recap and the public launch.

It’s live at the link above, and still getting new features.