Tracking Abby the Cabbie across America, one quiet signal at a time.

We came across Hold My Gear the way most good things land in a day: via Instagram, mid-scroll. Ollie and Seth were somewhere in Africa, posting from a tiny three-wheeler called Sheila, and the content was a kind of honest you don't get from production crews. Dust, breakdowns, small kindnesses, impossible hills, and a vehicle that, by any rational measure, should not have been doing what it was doing.

We loved it immediately. We followed along, sent the videos to each other in Slack, and started rooting for them the way you root for friends.

When Ollie and Seth told us about the next trip, a World Cup road trip across America in Abby the Cabbie, the question of live tracking came up for the first time. Sheila's Africa journey had been a no-tracker affair, all stories told after the fact. This time round people wanted to follow along in real time. Schools wanted to pin Abby on a map. Family wanted to know roughly where the cab had got to today.

The catch was Abby. Like Sheila before her, she is not a modern car. There is no built-in GPS, no telemetry port that talks to a fleet platform, no connected app that surfaces position to a browser. The vehicles Hold My Gear pick are wonderfully analogue, and that is the whole point. So the tracking had to come from somewhere else, and it had to be fitted in a hurry.

We offered to build the tracking ourselves. The brief was short: affordable, reliable, scalable, and ready to go before the wheels rolled. Not a prototype that looks good in a screenshot, an actual production tool that would keep serving positions live to anyone who turned up at the URL.

What it became, in the end, is a self-hosted Traccar ingestion path on the device side, a server-side proxy on Crowswatch that holds the credentials and pulls fixes safely into the page, and a Mapbox view tuned for one vehicle rather than a fleet. Sticky last-known position so the cab never disappears if Abby pulls into a basement car park. Friendly status copy that says "Stationary" rather than "Offline" when she has just stopped for fuel. A primary tracker and a quiet backup, kept invisible until it is needed.

We tested it on real journeys before launch, including some deliberately ugly ones (signal blackouts, dead phones, GPS drift, hours of standing still) so that the public map would hold up the first time it was loaded by anyone other than us.