Automatically stop recording an activity when I get in the car.

[rrajao]

The idea here is that a lot of people forget to stop Strava after the activity. Then they put the bike in the car and drive off, grabbing a bunch of KOMs along the way until they remember to stop Strava.

One way to do this would be to automatically stop Strava if the current speed suddenly increases a lot, provided that I'm not going downhill. 

Android puts my phone on mute and routes all calls through the car's radio automatically when I start driving, so I think Strava could implement something similar to figure out that I'm driving. 

[Bryant]

Hey @rrajao ,
Thank you for providing so much detail with your idea. It has been reviewed by our Moderation team and now open to voting.
Thank you for your contributions!

[Jimg]

Greate idea,

I see this regularly in/after our club runs. Figuring out speed difference when a runner gets into their car should be even easier than for biking.

[Rihards]

Perhaps even better, or as an option - warn the user (like vibrating a watch).

That way a brief GPS glitch won't end the activity, and the user will have a chance to end it quickly enough.

It would still end up with the need to crop a bit, so syncing crop changes to the platform data (like Apple Health) would still be desirable: https://communityhub.strava.com/t5/ideas/syncing-the-cropped-stats-to-apple-health/idi-p/6443#M2781 .

[anchskier]

This would be challenging to accurately implement.  Your Android phone probably uses the fact that it synced with the car as it's cue that it is in a vehicle when it mutes itself rather than anything relating to speed or movement.  As you mentioned, the issue would be if someone just turned and went downhill.  How would Strava know the difference?  It isn't uncommon for someone to do a 30 to 60 (or longer) minute climb and then turn and be doing 40-50mph downhill for an extended time.  This would act very similarly to someone getting done with their ride and jumping in a car to drive down the road.  There could possibly be some indicators that it could look to such as the grade of the surface they are on (that kind of acceleration on a flat road might be an indicator of getting in a vehicle), but then again, some people are fast sprinters and go for segments that way.  I wouldn't want the program to automatically stop the file (thus losing the data), but maybe note the location and give some option to crop at that point IF it turned out they did get in a car there.  I would get really annoyed if it automatically stopped my file when I was actually still riding and just happened to hit a long downhill or went for a sprint/interval.  

[Jan_Mantau]

I don't think it will be technical possible for the Strava app to recognize if someone is in the car but similarly to what Rihards said, vibrating/beeping on auto pause and vibrating/beeping on moving again should heighten the awareness that a recording runs.

[Rihards]

Absolutely, no need to overthink this (then it will never happen).

A warning of "You're going at nn km/h" would completely suffice. The "nn" could be customisable, but could as well have presets per activity type. For example, I forgot to stop my hike. There's no way I was rolling down a hill at 90 km/h during a hike.

Such an improvement doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. It just needs to allow users to spot most of such occurrences.

[Jane]

Hello. We wanted to let you know that your idea submission from November of 2022 will be archived. While this idea is interesting, we don’t have any immediate plans to implement this and currently aren’t able to prioritize this idea.

Please note that your feedback is valuable to Strava. As stated in our Community Idea Guidelines, we receive many idea submissions each week, and realistically, there may be various reasons that prevent us from including an idea on our Product Roadmap.  

We want to thank you for taking the time to submit your idea and we look forward to your continued contributions to the Strava Community.