In development · iOS & Android
You already pass a thousand cars a week. Start keeping them.
Roadbuds turns the drive itself into a collection. Pass another Roadbuds driver on a real road, log the pass in the app, and it counts toward their car in your CarDex — the commute you were doing anyway, made into something worth paying attention to.
Toyota RAV4
2019–2025
Tap a car on the map to log a pass.
- A pass
- You drive past another Roadbuds driver in real life. You tap once. That is a pass.
- The count
- Each pass takes one off their car: eighteen for a Camry, one for a DeLorean. The same driver only counts again after six hours, so an everyday car takes weeks.
- Adding
- Add them from the pass and you can chat. The commute turns into a friends list.
- 1,711 makes and models
- 2,418 entries with year variants
- 6 rarity tiers
- Toyota Camry 18 passes
- DeLorean DMC-12 1 pass
- No feed to farm
- No way to buy an entry
- Map sharing off by default
The loop
Three things happen, in this order.
There is no feed to farm and nothing to post before the game starts. Open the app while you are out and the drivers around you are already there.
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Add your car
Pick your vehicle from a catalogue of 1,711 real makes and models. That car is your identity on the road — it is what other drivers unlock when they pass you.
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Drive like you already do
When you and another Roadbuds driver are on the same stretch of road, they show up in the app and you log the pass. Same person counts again after six hours, so an ordinary car takes weeks of real commutes — which is what makes a rare one worth having.
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Collect what you passed
Every pass earns XP and moves that car closer to unlocked. The rarer it is, the fewer passes it takes: a Camry is eighteen, a Mythic is one. Finish it and it is yours for good.
Rarity
The rarer the car, the fewer passes it takes.
Every one of the 2,418 entries sits in one of six tiers, and the tier sets the price. Cars are graded by how hard they are to come across on a real road — a Camry needs eighteen passes, a DeLorean needs one.
The CarDex
Every car you have ever passed, in one book.
The CarDex is the record of your driving. It fills in slowly and only from real roads — there is no way to buy an entry and no way to unlock one from your couch. A Miata on the school run and a Countach at a meet are the same kind of discovery; they are just worth very different amounts.
Photo credits for the cars on this page
Photographs are used under Creative Commons and public-domain licences, credited to the person who took them. The credits page explains how to have a photograph credited or removed.
Location, handled properly
A driving app that cannot show anyone where you parked.
Roadbuds needs to know you are moving. It does not need to know where you live, and it is built so that it cannot tell anyone. These are behaviours of the product, not promises in a policy.
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01
Your position freezes when you stop Location only updates while you are actually driving. When you slow to a stop, your position rewinds and freezes before it gets there, so the map never resolves to a driveway, an office or a school.
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02
The map is off until you turn it on Sharing your position is off by default for every new account. When you do enable it, you choose between all of your friends or a list you pick by hand.
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03
Private zones blank you out entirely Draw a circle around anywhere that matters — home, work, a parent's house — and you simply do not appear on the map inside it.
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04
Strangers cannot see you at all Anyone who is not your friend is simply absent from your map, and you from theirs. There is a separate setting that opts you into the wider network, off unless you turn it on, and even then you are blacked out within 50 miles for a friend of a friend and 200 for anyone else — ambient activity, never someone who can be found.
The road is the game.
A car-spotting game played on the roads you already drive. In development for iOS and Android.