27 Apr 2024 - Review of the new OBU

It's been a few weeks since I installed the new OBU in my car.  Though there have been much negative feedback on the design of the unit, there are several new features that I thought are pretty useful.

First of all, the date and time are showing very prominently on the screen but what is more important is that the balance value of the cash card is always showing at the top left corner of the screen.  In the old IU unit, I had to pull out and insert the cashcard every time I want to check on the balance of my cash card.

There are also a lot of complaints about the position of the component where cash card is supposed to be inserted.  Many people feedback that it's very inconvenient for driver to reach to that component to access to the cash card.  But the fact is that there is actually no need to access the cash card at all.  If you are talking about exiting a car park with complimentary coupon, all we need to do is to press on the icon at the bottom right corner of the screen and the cash card unit will be disabled.  With this, there is no longer a need to take out the cash card while exiting car park with complimentary coupon.  Also, we can configure auto-top up for the cash card whenever there is insufficient fund.  As such, I can't think of any scenario when a driver needs to access to the cash card.

Another useful feature is that with in-built GPS in the unit, it will detect your location and warn you if bus lane is in operation.  It will also warn you when you entered a school zone or a silver zone.

Recently a new feature has been pushed down to the unit that shows the estimated time to reach certain location (eg. airport) when you are on an expressway.  Going forward, I'm sure there will be more useful features that will be pushed down.