Features

White when you are within the limit, yellow inside the safety margin, orange when you are over, and red when you are well over. A quick glance is all it takes.

A white disc with a red ring, just like the P.127 sign by the road. When no source knows the limit for sure, the sign stays blank. If you turn on “Estimate when data is missing”, an estimated number is dimmed and marked “~ estimated” underneath.

GPS is handled quietly, just like Google Maps — no signal dot and no spoken GPS hints. A short status line appears only when there is something to do or know: location turned off, location permission missing, only approximate location, demo or tour mode, or “Outside Vietnam”.

RoadMatcher reads the roads drawn on the map to work out which stretch you are on, along with its name and class. Its thresholds are set in metres and widen automatically as GPS accuracy drops.

The app comes with a built-in table of signs: speed, no turn, no overtaking, tunnel, low bridge, camera. The next sign appears large in a corner along with its distance, and signs reported by the community are shown on top.

Read directly from the map tiles already loaded, so no internet connection is needed. Only places ahead of the car are shown — knowing there is a station in 2 km gives you time to move into the right lane.

Tap the sign to open a 30–120 km/h grid, choose the correct number, and the app will remember it for that area. To undo, tap ‘use default’.

Distance, driving time, average / top speed and the number of times you went over the limit are tallied during the journey and saved to your history when it ends. Trips under 300 m are not recorded.

The music tile on the launcher's home screen shows what your music app is playing, with play/pause and skip. The launcher does not play the music itself — it simply relays the controls, so you can change tracks without ever leaving the map.

A 3 km/h buffer keeps alerts from flickering on and off, repeats are spaced 30/20/12 s apart depending on severity, and the default margin is +5 km/h — but if you move up to a more serious level, you are told straight away. The Vietnamese voice is pre-recorded MP3, so it plays on every head unit.

The camera measures the gap to the car ahead and warns you when you are closer than Article 11 of Circular 31/2019 (35 m at 60 km/h, 55 at 80, 70 at 100, 100 at 120). Below 60 km/h the 2-second rule applies; below 20 km/h it stays quiet. This alert takes priority over everything else.

Traffic light locations come from OpenStreetMap and are built into the app. It says “traffic light in 200 m” if you approach without easing off the accelerator — at most once per light, and never below 25 km/h. The app cannot see whether the light is red or green; it is simply a reminder to check.

The law limits continuous driving to 4 hours. The app counts only the time the car is actually moving; a break of 15 minutes or more resets the timer, while a two-minute fuel stop does not.

The trip greeting is spoken just once. Folk sayings on empty roads (off by default) play only after 12 minutes without any alert — in town you will hardly ever hear them, and any real alert takes over immediately.

Tiếng Việt, English, 日本語 — both the screen text and the voice. Vietnamese alerts are pre-recorded; English and Japanese use the device voice, and fall back to a short beep if no voice is installed.

Car, heavy truck or motorbike — the type changes the whole speed-limit table under Article 7 of Circular 31/2019: a heavy truck outside built-up areas is limited to 80/70, not 90/80. If everyone were treated as a ‘car’, truck drivers would be warned 10 km/h too late.

Plug an ELM327 into the port under the steering wheel and pair it over Bluetooth (or connect to the dongle's WiFi). Speed then comes straight from the car instead of GPS, the rev counter shows a real value, and you can check coolant, oil, voltage and fault codes. Overheating or a Check Engine warning is announced once for each level.

Works with aftermarket Bluetooth TPMS valve caps. Shows kPa / bar / psi, whichever you prefer, and speaks up only when a tyre is out of range. It cannot read the car's factory sensors, as tyre pressure is not part of standard OBD-II.

Place your own image between the two gauges. It comes in the same pack as OBD-II; every safety feature — speed alerts, rest, distance, navigation, lights — stays outside the pack and is free forever.

A second app, vn.com.zsoft.mapcar.phone, projects the map onto the car's built-in screen through Android Auto, with following-distance warnings from the phone camera. It shares the same core, with an interface of its own.

Rewritten in Swift with the same alert rules and the same servers: limit sign, navigation with street names even offline, rest reminder, camera following distance on Core ML, OBD-II over Bluetooth LE or WiFi, MapCar Pro through the App Store. On the App Store for iOS 16 or later, and on CarPlay too: map screen, Dashboard and instrument cluster.

Public map tiles label the Paracels with foreign administrative names. The app hides those labels and shows the Vietnamese island names from data built into the APK. This is a requirement of the Law on Surveying and Mapping, not a design choice.