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Automobiles are environments rich of data that have a high potential to be used as input for research and design. Various difficulties accessing car data exclude HCI experts from making use of this data in novel interfaces and research projects. We present the CarDaT (Car Data Toolkit) that uses Android smartphones to provide multidimensional sensor data in a minimal invasive way. CarDaT combines smartphone sensor data with data sources like OBD-II as well as other easily available remote data (e.g., weather). This data and the provided connectivity enable researchers to gather data on human behavior and designers to create novel context-aware interface solutions. Thus, CarDaT offers a low-cost, manufacturer independent and scalable in-car agile prototyping and research environment. In this paper we describe how we used smartphones in the CarDaT as tools for automotive research and design. We …