Every car has a story ... and maybe a QR automobile bio tag to tell it
Paul Rooprai of Traverse City, Michigan, was on a business trip in Germany in 2019 with some time to kill before heading home. So the lifelong car guy did what any enthusiast would do: He headed to the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. Having never been there, Rooprai started snapping photos of rare race cars and the placards that accompanied them.
“There’s some rare stuff there, so I wasn’t going to remember all that,” Rooprai said. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ll get back on the plane and I’ll put it all back together — and that was a colossal mess.’ ”
Not able to logically organize what he had shot, Rooprai considered his quandary.
“I literally took out my notebook and I sketched out this idea for a tag that could be applied to the car or to a placard and with the smartphone in my pocket, I could just scan it and pick up the car’s story.”
Like his father, Paul is a bit of a tinkerer, always coming up with new ideas.
Dubbed Autobiotags. com, or AutoBio for short, it’s a virtual brag book for car owners. For a one-time fee of $49, car owners receive a unique QR code for their collector car, as well as access to build a webpage about their car with stats, stories and room for approximately 40 files.
Viewers can register with the site at no charge and “store” their favorite cars in a digital “garage” free of charge. There’s no app to download or subscription cost. Nor is there advertising.
“We built it that way on purpose so that when an enthusiast is standing at a car, no matter where it is in the world, they don’t have that point of frustration where they’ve got to download something before they can enjoy it,” Paul said.