How the AI uses your data

AutoBrain's AI is a tool you point at your own records. Here is exactly what each feature reads, what it does, and what happens to it.

What AutoBrain is

AutoBrain is an AI-powered car companion. It tracks your vehicles, maintenance, fuel, parts and logbook, and uses AI to turn that history into useful answers: "what's likely to need attention next", "what could this fault be", "what is this receipt for", "what is the car worth".

The platform is open source (MIT) and can run entirely on your own infrastructure.

What the AI does

  • AI diagnostics — you describe a symptom or paste OBD fault codes; the AI suggests likely causes, severity and parts.
  • Service prediction (paid plans) — reads your service history to estimate what is due next, when and at what odometer. When a service suggestion is generated, AutoBrain looks up the parts you'll need — checking your own parts inventory first, then suggesting parts from the catalogue.
  • Parts lookup (paid plans) — ask for parts from inside your inventory and AutoBrain looks them up against the parts catalogue, fitted to your vehicle by rego, with the AI tidying the results.
  • Receipt & parts OCR — extracts items, labour, cost and warranty from a scanned receipt into your records.
  • Fuel OCR — reads litres, price and date from a fuel receipt.
  • Odometer reading — reads a dashboard photo to log the current reading.
  • Resale estimate — estimates a value range from your vehicle details, history and mods.
  • Mod impact — estimates how a modification affects value and reliability.

Exactly what data the AI sees

Only the data needed for the task is sent, and only when you trigger the feature:

  • Diagnostics — your symptom description or the OBD codes you paste.
  • Service prediction — the service history of the selected vehicle.
  • Receipt OCR — the image you uploaded.
  • Resale — make, model, year, odometer, condition, mod list and service count.

The request goes to the AI router configured for your server. On the hosted service that is AutoBrain's own router; when you self-host, it is whatever router you point at — including none, in which case everything runs locally on rule-based fallbacks and nothing leaves your server.

What happens to it

  • The AI output (not your raw data) is stored with your records so the answer is reproducible.
  • Your data is never used to train models and is never sold.
  • You can export your full profile or delete data at any time.
  • If the router is unreachable, the app falls back to on-server rules — the feature keeps working.

More detail lives in the repo docs and in our privacy policy.