A map designed for you and your car
Maps are magical. I remember playing on one of those "small town" rugs when I was a kid, with its exaggerated roads and all the places you could go, cruising my toy cars around the corners and making "veeeerooooom" noises. I never really shook this fascination.
Over the next few decades the world became more digitized, maps became something you opened in a browser instead of something that tumbled out of a glovebox, and cars became ever-more-complex computers on wheels.
And yet, the driving experience is all too often disconnected from the map experience. In a second, we can get directions anywhere on the planet, yet the map hardly has any concept of us, the driver, and how our personal preferences might influence the places we go and how we get there.
Maps rarely know what you drive, how you drive, or the roads you prefer to travel, and even more rarely in a way that respects your privacy.
So I decided to build one that does.
Pelican exists to bring joy to navigation through craft, and to build a closer relationship with the cars that carry us. It's a map that gets to know you and your car.
Pelican's journey
- It started as an Apple Watch app.
- Connected Accounts added to read car state.
- Then an iPhone app was built.
- Then CarPlay.
- After reading hundreds of pages of OEM standards, OBD scanning was added to read car state directly.
- 1.19The OBDb, the open database of OBD parameters.
- Widgets in CarPlay.
- 1.21On-device document scanning and storage.
- 2.0Turn-by-turn navigation in CarPlay.
- Voice guidance.
- Mileage leaderboards.
- 2.3The Danger Zone.
- 3.0Scout reports.
- 3.2Scout, the companion app.
- 3.4Rearview, a look back at your year of driving.
- 4.0Record tracking.
- 5.0Offline maps and Pelican Navigation, built on OpenStreetMap.
- The Fog.
- Stop signs, traffic lights and yield signs along the route.
- 5.1Speed cameras, red light cameras and license plate readers.
Where Pelican is today
More than 100,000 drivers use Pelican. Clutch Engineering reached ramen profitability in 2025.
How Pelican stays independent
Pelican's business model is simple: it lives or dies by whether drivers pay for it. Pelican exists to be the best product it can be for drivers.
Clutch Engineering, the company that builds Pelican, is a bootstrapped startup.
š Hey there, I'm Jeff
I've been designing for the iPhone since 2009 and creating software since I was 13, and I love turning massive problems into elegant user interfaces.
I started my Apple platforms career as the third engineer on Facebook's iOS team and I built the first version of the Facebook iPad app. In 2010 I took over Three20 and then built Nimbus, two open source iOS frameworks used by thousands of apps on the App Store and hundreds of millions of people.
In 2012, I was on the team that launched Google Maps for iOS v1, and I led its UX engineering. I left Google and spent a year backpacking the world, and returned for a ten-year tenure, during which I led design and engineering guidance for Apple platforms. My team and a community of iOS developers within Google fought hard to make Google's products be best-in-class citizens. I concluded that decade as a Staff Software Engineer.
Clutch Engineering is my studio in New York. Besides Pelican, Clutch Engineering also produces CAN Studio, a Mac tool for reading large datasets of car data; ELMCheck, a tool for checking the authenticity of OBD scanners; and Watchmen, an app that maps the surveillance cameras in public places.
More about me at jeffverkoeyen.com. Press questions go to press@clutch.engineering.
How Pelican is designed
Three core principles drive Pelican's design process.
1. Design for the niche
Here's something I find a bit funny: most people building software in big tech hubs don't drive. This makes the experience of driving surprisingly niche through the lens of the tech companies. OEMs want you to use their software in the car, and large tech companies want you to... well, they probably want you to use a self-driving car. That leaves very few companies actually focused on the driver's combined car + map experience. This is the exact spot I've decided to set up shop.
Clutch Engineering's mission: to implement a business model that sustainably prioritizes building best-in-class solutions for niche product categories.
2. Focus on the road, let Pelican do the rest
Pelican should just work. When you plug in an OBD scanner, I don't want you picking from configuration names, or reading a spec sheet. Pelican identifies the car, figures out how to talk to it, and builds insights that help you understand your car with zero effort. Pelican's trip logger is similarly designed to be intentionally forgotten about. The best features in Pelican are the ones that get out of your way as rapidly as possible.
Recently there's been a trend of putting AI assistants in cars. While I understand the novelty, I don't believe the people yearn to argue speak with their car. I think drivers want to drive safely and have the car anticipate what they need before they know they need it. This shapes the kind of intelligence built into Pelican, where it's more focused on solving specific tasks efficiently, quietly, and non-intrusively. Natural eleganceĀ over artificial intelligence.
3. Give back
We all stand on the history of humanity when we build something new, and I believe that part of respecting that vantage point involves giving back to the communities that keep the world turning. In 2025, Clutch Engineering became a corporate sponsor of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and I hope to continue to allocate a share of the company's profits toward more foundations that Clutch Engineering benefits from as the company grows.
