Method
How this comparison is made, and who pays for it
We make one of the products on this site. Here is how the comparison is built so that fact cannot quietly bend it.
The conflict of interest
A comparison site owned by the maker of one of the compared products is, by default, marketing. There is no arrangement of words that makes that untrue, so the only useful response is to build the thing so the bias has nowhere to hide.
Concretely: there is no overall winner and no score. Products are listed alphabetically on every page, which puts our own app fifth of ten rather than anywhere flattering. Our entry is labelled as ours in every table it appears in. And the recommendation pages sort on the capability that actually decides the situation — which sends readers away from us on most of them, because a routing app cannot precondition a battery, cannot pay for a charge and does not run on Android.
What counts as evidence for a feature
Only the vendor’s own public documentation — product pages, pricing pages, app store listings, owner manuals, official announcements. Not reviews, not forum posts, not our own experience of the app, and not inference from what a product obviously must do.
That last exclusion is the strict one and it produces results that look wrong. A Better Routeplanner almost certainly accounts for elevation; everyone who has used it in the Alps believes so. It is marked unverified because we could not find the claim on the vendor’s pages. We would rather carry a visible gap than a plausible guess, because a guess is indistinguishable from a fact once it is in a table and translated into 41 languages.
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ● Yes | The vendor documents the capability without significant qualification. |
| ◐ Partly | Documented, but behind a subscription, limited to certain vehicles, or confined to one country. |
| ○ No | The vendor documents that it does not, or the capability is plainly outside the product’s scope. |
| – Unverified | We could not establish it from the vendor’s own documentation. A gap in our checking, not evidence of absence. |
Why "partly" carries so much weight
Most capabilities in this category are conditional. Live charger availability exists but costs €5 a month. Preconditioning exists but only on one model year of one car. Route planning exists but only in the United Kingdom. Collapsing any of that to a green tick is how comparison tables mislead without stating anything false, so the middle value does most of the work here.
What we do not measure
Whether the app is pleasant. Whether its charger database is accurate in your country, which is the single largest determinant of whether a plan survives contact with a motorway. Whether the subscription renews at a price you would have agreed to. These matter enormously and a capability matrix cannot see any of them.
Treat the table as a filter that produces a shortlist of two or three, then drive with one for a fortnight. There is no substitute for that and this site is not pretending to be one.
Corrections
If a cell here is wrong — and in a category that ships monthly, some of them will be — the fix is a documentation link showing otherwise. Vendors and readers are equally welcome to send one.