Slashdot Mirror
Appeal For Commuter GPS Logs To Aid Electric Cars
holy_calamity writes "A team at Carnegie Mellon University has begun a project seeking to design a kit to cheaply convert secondhand cars into cheap, electric ones suitable for commuting, if little else. They hope to rely heavily on smart management software to extract as much efficiency as possible from regenerative braking, and knowledge of terrain from GPS tracking. But they are hampered by a lack of public data on how commuters actually drive. Their solution is to appeal to GPS users to upload .gpx log files of their commute to the team's site. The data is plugged into a simulator that reveals how much cheaper an electric car could do your journey, and an anonymized public dataset will be created. A programming contest will award a production electric car to the coder who designs the best management algorithm using it."
Is that where they break, and then fix themselves?
I am Car of Borg. You will be assimilated.
From what I see here in rush hour, you only need boolean control: Full throttle or hard braking. When I coast towards a red light, there'll always be someone next to me who steps on it and cuts in front of me.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It's "braking," people. Braking. Though in the case of electric cars, that usually means decelerating/regenerating. The friction brakes on my Tesla still squeak after 12,000 miles of driving.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
"It seems that 99.9% of drivers drive the speed limit, and engine-break to lights."
Do they really expect anyone who isn't already driving a hybrid or electric and/or driving super-energy conscious will be interested in helping a project like this and send in Data? How people really commute: They drive 10-20 miles over the speed limit on highways, and 5-15 miles over the speed limit on city streets. They speed up to get in front of a slower (but still over the speed limit) car, just in time to brake hard for the stoplight. The data they collect will say regenerative braking is pointless, but the common-knowledge data will say that regenerative braking is the bee's knees.
Ok, so maybe someone can help me out here, but how exactly do you anonymize travel data?
You have a table of GPS tracks. And you have a table of cars. And the two tables have no columns in-common that could be used to join the data.
Comment of the year
So someone who's more in-the-know with anonymizing data sets of this or similar nature able to shed some light on this?
Much like social networking sites, the best solution is not to upload anything you don't want your name on. Since they're trying to build a "commuter car" as opposed to a "adult video shopping excursion car", the best solution is to only upload the drive to and from work, unless your work happens to be "professional adult video shopper".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
According to http://www.sahkoautot.fi/eng:faq#toc3, lithium batteries will last for about 125,000 miles. What nobody wants to talk about is the price of replacing them. They just want to talk about how "cheap" it is to charge them. Articles just assume that by the time you need to replace them, surely cheaper and better batteries will be available. I've heard estimates of about $10,000 for replacing the batteries in an electric vehicle. So that's 8 cents per mile times 30 miles per gallon that conventional engines get for the same size vehicle which is $2.40. So pretty much zero savings.
My Versa gets around 36mpg which bumps the cost per gallon of the electric up to $2.88 which is about 30 cents more than fuel in my area. And that doesn't include the cost of electricity needed to charge the batteries.
Electric cars simply cannot beat the economics of a small commuter car. Until they get the price and performance of rechargeable batteries well below the cost of regular gas there's no financial incentive to buy an electric car. They need to do far better than 8 cents per mile for electric. I'm not going to spend $20,000+ on a car just to have electric when I'm saving no money per mile and could have spent $10,000 less on standard car AND saved money on getting where I want to go.
Work Safe Porn
Well, once would have to wonder if CMU produces any IP as a result of this free data, would they release all copyrights and patents for free?
Or is that different?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you