The Zus Smart USB Charger and Car Finder is an interesting take on the humble car charger, not only does it allow you to charge two USB powered devices at once, it also helps you find your car.
Now to be clear this isn’t a car tracker, the finder element is a car location remembering tool. When you park up the Zus automatically communicates with an app on your phone and the app logs the car location. If you’re not sure where your car is (it’s happened a number of times in the Trafford Centre’s large car park!) you whip out your mobile, fire up the app and get a compass giving you a distance and pointing you in the general direction.
Generally this has worked rather well, it gives you the direction to go as the crow flies rather than step by step directions. If you’re not parked in a wide open car park but instead are parked on some back street you have the option of taking a look at a map view of the cars location, giving you an idea of the street you need to go down.
This therefore relies on your mobile having a decent GPS signal, which is fine in outdoor car parks, but to date this hasn’t been tried in a multi story or underground car park where the GPS signal could be blocked.
The app has an additional feature that allows you to record how long you have in your parking spot, handy for timed parking situations and allows you to share your cars location, extra handy if you need someone to pick it up for you.
When you park up the app will let you know the location’s been recorded and check if you want to set a time. It’d be good if you could set ‘no assistance required’ zones, for example when parking up at home or work there isn’t really a need to get a notification that the car location has been recorded.
The build quality is very good, much better than low cost in car chargers and it does a good job of quickly charging as you can see in the review video.
Available from Amazon UK: https://amzn.to/1TIdmNy and Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/1KV7tLB
