There once was a time when you had to pull out your engine and hardwire it to a dynamometer to get power and torque measurements at the crankshaft or put your ride on a drive roller and use a chassis dynamometer to get stats on power delivered to the wheel. That’s so like 2007. Now, thanks to the Apple iPhone and a team of gear-head developers at BunsenTech, an application aptly named Dynolicious handles all this for the everyday performance junky and amateur racer set.

Dynolicious provides all the specs you need to match your ride against your homie. Some of the main highlights include 0-60 mph times (as well as 0-100 mph), quarter mile elapsed and trap times, lateral G’s and Braking G’s (both current and peak) as well as wheel horsepower and estimate engine horsepower. Not only does it grab all this awesome data but actually shows it to you in a way that make sense to regular folk who are not statisticians. You get real-time speedometer and friction circle readings with graphs, the ability to review info for your latest run (or any run you have saved in the past) as well as the option to compare different cars or particular dates if you want to see what that new bolt-on Comptech supercharger does for your performance.

Going the traditional route, each hop on a dyno will typically set you back at least $100 bucks plus additional fees for various add-on services and test data. The Dynolicious app will only set you back $12.99 and you can run it all the time (not necessary recommended if you actually want to have some battery juice left to talk.) But you get the point.

So, how can this little dynamo provide so much for so little? Accelerometers can determine orientation, vibration and shocks by detecting the magnitude and direction of acceleration. And the iPhone uses a 3-axis accelerometer to accurately calculate all of the various parameters required. For me, the iPhone’s Dynolicious might be the “killer app” that finally forces me to give up my Blackberry Curve, which does e-mail great, but in the car basically just slides around my dash.

Source: Dynolicious