While Google is busy being a power company, a cleantech VC and an all-round eco do-gooder, the search giant is also working on its plug-in electric vehicle project, on which it plans to spend $10 million and has converted four Toyota Priuses and two Ford Escape hybrids to plug-in cars. Last week, good ol’ Googs launched a blog to follow its electric vehicle project and track the industry.
As you can see from the data above, Google is tracking all of the cars to figure out how productive plug-ins really are. The system uses a laptop to collect data on speed, distance driven, fuel use and battery info, and uploads the data via a wireless data card to Google’s servers. GPS is also used to plot geography and potentially measure the performance at different altitudes…
Katie Fehrenbacher’s point – is the value of transparency. Publishing in-progress data in a project like this is useful to folks interested in all aspects of the tech.
#20 lol
Ever hear of super capacitors?
You trickle charge them all day long, with solar panels, or small wind turbines.
Then you can “upload” the amps to your car, rather quickly.
If you’re going to deploy EV’s massively, creating power locally, where it’s needed, is a no-brainer.
Ever seen the Wal-Mart solar parking lot idea?
Car are in the shade, free juice while you shop.
Why don’t you guys admit it? You’d rather pay 17999$ for a Jeep Cherokee than 21000$ for a hybrid.
One increases you manhood, the other your intelligence.
Um, lessee… Ten million divided by four Prius and two Fords… Carry the one… Nope. Can’t afford all that savings.
I want a “Model T” of plug-in cars. No fancy crap… not even a lot of comfort… basically a road-legal golf cart that’s all-weather.
It needs to do about 30 mpg (city streets) and run for about 90 minutes.
This, of course, is not my main car. It’s the car I hop into for grocery shopping, running errands, take the kids to school, etc.
It also needs to be about half the price of a gas car.
I think such a car would be popular.
At least any form of personal transportation is better than every form of mass transit. You could at least still have urban sprawl with go-karts. Urban planners are the true evil in the world.
#23 gregallen, there’s a problem I’m seeing with your analysis. Those cars save money and are nice, but then the only place these would be used are cities, and in those cities land is expensive, and getting the extra garage space for those cars would be more expensive than the savings.
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I tested this camera for a client. I didn’t have the light running for more than 15 minutes. The battery lasted approximately 6 hours before recharging. The LCD, however, had a few dead pixels – never saw this before. Tried returning for exchange and had to put up quite a fight. Anyone else seen this? http://www.batteryfast.com.au
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