How do HeyPolo's driving features work?

Knowing that someone made it home safely shouldn't mean watching their every turn. HeyPolo's driving features - crash detection alerts, risky driving habit detection, personal and group driving safety scores, trip replay, and transportation modes - are designed to give your HeyPolo group real peace of mind on the road, without turning location sharing into surveillance. This guide walks you through where to find each driving feature, how it works, and how it fits into HeyPolo's care-without-control approach.

This is what you need

• Location Services enabled and set to "Always" or "Precise," as needed for accurate location sharing.
• Motion & Fitness (iOS) or Physical Activity (Android) permissions granted, since driving detection relies on your phone's motion sensors combined with location and speed data to recognize when a trip has started - the same underlying signal type used by driving-detection systems industry-wide, which analyze phone location and activity to determine when a member is driving.
• Background battery optimization for the HeyPolo app, so it can detect trips even when you're not actively looking at your phone.
• Join a HeyPolo Group with your visibility set to precise, since these features are group-based by design.

Here are the features in more detail

• Visibility must be precise: 
  1. Tap your group name at the top of your profile.
  2. Tap the three circles next to your group name.
  3. Tap “My visibility.”
  4. Change it so your group can see your trip history.
• Understand Crash Detection Alerts: 
  1. When enabled, HeyPolo uses your phone's motion sensors and speed data to recognize signs of a potential collision (like a sudden, severe deceleration). 
  2. If a possible crash is detected, HeyPolo can prompt you to confirm you're okay and, if you don't respond, notify your chosen circle members so help can be checked on quickly - without anyone needing to be watching in real time.
• Check Risky Driving Habit Detection: 
  1. This feature looks for patterns like hard braking, rapid acceleration, speeding, or phone handling while driving. 
  2. Instead of constant judgment, HeyPolo frames this as context: occasional flags help you understand your own habits, and shared visibility is always something the group agrees to, not something imposed.
• View your Personal Driving Safety Score:
  1. Open the "Driving" tab in your profile to see a score reflecting recent trips, based on the same categories of behavior (braking, speed, phone use) that industry driving-score models draw from. 
  2. It's meant to be a private mirror for self-improvement first, and something you choose to share - not a report card issued to others by default.
• Check the Group Driving Safety Score:
  1. If your group opts in to shared visibility, you'll also see an aggregated score reflecting overall group driving trends. 
  2. This is designed to spark supportive conversations (like coaching a new teen driver) rather than create pressure or comparison.
• Use Trip Replay: 
  1. Tap on any completed trip in your Driving history to replay the route, timing, and any flagged events. 
  2. Because history matters for context (like confirming a safe arrival after a long drive), keeping a personal record is useful - and if you ever want to preserve a specific trip beyond the in-app retention window, taking a screenshot of the replay is the most reliable way to keep that record, since this is the standard approach recommended for preserving drive history over time.

Additional tips

• Driving features work best with consistent connectivity - a strong Wi-Fi or cellular signal helps HeyPolo detect trip start/stop accurately.
• If you have a new or teen driver in your group, treat the safety score as a shared learning tool rather than a monitoring device - HeyPolo's principle is care without control at every step.