The Bottom Line: Is Arccos Driver worth the money?
I’m guessing that’s what you came here to find out. Let me lay it out for you; If you’re looking to gather more information about your driver game, or are just looking for some low intensity side game fun, the answer is a resounding yes.
For more detail, read on.
What is Arccos Driver
Arccos Driver is a simplified, or more targeted, version of the popular Arccos Shot Tracking System. Rather than gather data for your entire game like the flagship Arccos product, the smart phone integrated single sensor Driver system is focused exclusively on – you guessed it – driver performance.
In addition to providing key driver metrics, Arccos Driver offers games within the larger game (golf), which not only ramps up the challenge, but can help keep things interesting when your round has gone south.
Getting Started
Getting started with Arccos Driver is simple. After creating an Arccos account, attach the device to your driver, pair the device with your phone as you would any other Bluetooth enabled accessory, grant permission for Arccos to access your phone’s microphone (more on that below) and you’re basically ready to go.
Key Features
Before you hit your first ball, the Arccos Driver application will issue a set of challenges for your round.
Examples include:
- Hit 4 fairways
- Hit 3 bomb drives (longer than 254)
Bomb is, of course, a relative term.
In theory, the challenges put a bit of extra emphasis and presumably focus on your driver game. For those who are into such things, successfully completing challenges will earn you Crowns and give you the bonus points necessary to climb the Arccos Driver leaderboard.
The latest software update introduced the King of the Hole feature. A bragging rights game, the King of the Hole is the Arccos Driver user who hits the longest drive on that particular hole. From what I can tell, only 3 golfers have used Arccos Driver on my home course, so I’m basically the king of every hole at McGregor Links.
For those who aren’t interested in the extra stuff, it’s all easy enough to ignore as you go about the business of smashing golf balls.
Arccos Driver Stats
The primary function of Arccos Driver is to track your driving distance. Within that narrow scope there’s a temptation to label Arccos Driver simply as a driver distance measuring device (seems obvious enough), but there’s a bit more to what Arccos Driver has to offer.
While there are some minor holes in the system (we’ll get to that), it comes close to being an all-encompassing driver performance metrics system.
Here’s a quick overview of the data points Arccos tracks:
Driving Handicap – An overview of total driving performance, Driving Handicap takes into account distance, accuracy, and the type of lie you have for your second shot. Driving Handicap basically takes Strokes Gained methodology and converts it to an easy to understand handicap value. The closer your driver handicap is to scratch, the better you are at driving the golf ball.
Your Longest drive – Arccos Driver stores your personal best (longest) drive on a hole by hole, round by round, and LONGEST DRIVE EVER basis. Obviously this is great for bragging rights, but it can also help you identify holes where the driver just isn’t working, and where a new approach could be beneficial.
Smart Distance – The Arccos version of a distance average, Smart Distance is an estimation of your expected distance on a well-struck drive. Arccos trims the outliers (too short to be good, too long to be reliable), and spits out an adjusted average along with your percentile rank compared to other Arccos users.
Smart Range – An expansion of your average, which we assume is derived using standard deviations, Smart Range provides a probable distance range for your drives. The narrower the range (smaller standard deviation), the greater your distance consistency. The equipment companies might also tell you that a wide range might suggest that you need a more forgiving driver.
Global rankings, based on comparisons to players of similar age and gender, are displayed for each metric. For example, I’m in the 73rd percentile for Smart Distance, but the 98th for Smart Range.
Arccos Driver also tracks accuracy and provides a percentage breakdown of shots landing left, right, and center. Certainly golfers looking to take one side out of play, or just hit the middle more often, would benefit from this info.
Arccos Driver Quirks
While Arccos Driver works well without much user intervention, it’s not completely without it’s quirks. Here are a few potential negatives to consider:
The Choke Down Sensation – Arccos appears to have put significant effort into making the device fit nearly seamlessly on the end of the grip. In fact, the device feels like an extension of the grip itself. In principle that should be a good thing, but I, along with others I had try the device, often fight the impulse to grip to the Arccos itself. If it were smaller, or didn’t fit so seamlessly with the grip, it likely would feel less like you’re choking down a bit when the device is attached.
It’s Always Listening – In order for Arccos Driver to determine drive distance it needs to figure out exactly from where you hit your second shot. With that comes two potential deal-breakers for some of you.
Your phone must be kept in your pocket, or at least in very close proximity to where you’re swinging. We’ve already heard some grumbling about this, but it’s worth covering in more detail.
The necessity of the phone-in-pocket requirement extends beyond Bluetooth signal strength. To determine your starting (tee) location the device interacts with your phone’s GPS directly. That’s pretty straightforward shot tracking stuff. How it determines the location of your 2nd shot without a second sensor, well that took a little ingenuity.
To know when your second shot has been struck, Arccos Driver uses your phone’s microphone. Seriously. At startup it turns on your phone’s microphone and then listens for impact. It’s literally always listening which, while I’ll admit doesn’t seem to have any negative implications other than a small hit to battery life*, just feels weird.
*Users of older iPhones (I have a 6S Plus) and Android devices have reported more significant battery drain.
The red “Driver” header is how you know Arccos is listening.
It also happens to be the only legitimate weakness of the Arccos driver system. While this method works more often than not, there are two situations where the system hasn’t worked perfectly.
1 – The Phone Doesn’t Properly Identify the Second Shot Location.
This actually happened to me on my first drive with Arccos driver. It was my typical Thursday night league, no range, no warm-up, first swing after sitting at a desk all day, weak flare to the right.
The shot actually went all of 206 yards (I’m not proud). Unfortunately, or fortunately from my perspective, Arccos didn’t properly register my second shot (a partially chunked 5 iron from a sandy lie). It did however pick up my 3rd shot, which left the application with the impression that my tee shot had traveled 301 yards.
Sounds right to me. I love this thing!
Interestingly, when I went to edit my shots there was a selectable dot suggesting the app knew something happened at that spot, but for whatever reason, it didn’t identify it as the location of my second swing. Perhaps Arccos didn’t believe a drive could be that awful.
2 – The Phone Identifies the Wrong Second Shot.
This situation happens more frequently and can be more difficult to sort out after the fact. If your drive is in close proximity to a playing partner’s, or you stop at his ball on the way to yours, the Arccos software will sometimes pick up his shot and assume it’s yours.
This has happened several times, and while sometimes I caught it immediately, sometimes it wasn’t until I reviewed the data later that I noticed something didn’t look quite right.
The good news is the software keeps track of everything it hears, so it’s easy enough to make corrections (just select the correct dot on the screen), but if it’s hours later, especially if multiple shots were recorded on a single hole, it can be a tedious process to sort out exactly what’s yours and what’s not.
Other Minor Annoyances
Bizarre GPS Readings – On one, and thus far only one, occasion the GPS got a little wonky and recorded my 2nd shot some 40+ yards short of where it actually took place. I know, I sound like a guy who thinks he hits it farther than he actually does, but I just owned up to a 206 yard drive. You think delusion is going to kick in now? The really sad part for me is that it’s basically the only good drive I’ve hit in weeks.
It’s not a big deal – probably a GPS glitch and not an Arccos glitch – and the software’s reasonably robust editing features allowed me to drag the tee shot to approximately the right spot. All I had to do was pull the line to create what appears as the middle dot (image right). Also worth mentioning, those same editing tools allow you to correct any inaccurate readings about fairway vs. rough vs. sand. Since Arccos relies on GPS imagery to make lie determinations, situations where a couple of feet make the difference between the fairway and rough are worth reviewing on a case by case basis as they will affect your Arccos Driving Handicap.
No real-time scoring – Arccos driver has driver tracking (obvious), basic GPS capability (front, middle, back), but lacks a real-time scoring feature. You can input your total score after the round, but there’s no hole-by-hole scorecard, which frankly, is one hell of an omission.
Perhaps the lack of inclusion is about steering you to the more robust (and expensive) complete Arccos package, but it’s the most glaring hole in a product that otherwise does everything you could reasonably expect it to.
Arccos Driver is a subscription product – While the first year of Arccos Driver is free, after that it will cost you $40 a year to keep using the premium features. You’ll still be able to use the GPS, track data in real-time, and participate in basic Crowns games, but your access to historical data will be limited to just a couple of rounds.
My thinking is that 50% of the retail price on an annual basis is excessive, and it’s just the sort of thing that may cause some users to take a fresh look at whatever competitive products happen to be on the market when it comes time to renew.
Is Arccos Driver Worth 80 Bucks?
Arccos Driver is as close as I’ve seen to a ‘set it and forget it’ shot tracking system. Sure, it’s not all-encompassing, but it’s not designed to be. Arccos Driver is designed to do one thing, and for the most part it does that one thing well.
You’ll likely have a small bit of editing to do after every round – also true of any shot tracker, but the result is a reasonably robust dataset that not only tracks personal bests and round by round improvements (or setbacks), but can also help you identify areas of your driving game that need improvement. That should ultimately help transition your mindset away from hit the ball far, while replacing it with a more robust definition of total driver performance.
An abundance of data, and a better mindset too. That’s definitely worth $80 (or less).
For more information visit arccosgolf.com, follow Arccos Golf on Twitter, or Like Arccos Golf on Facebook.
Mike h
8 years ago
My Samsung phone is to big to be carrying in a pocket during a round. That is enough to make me not buy this system.