holy_calamity writes "A team at Carnegie Mellon University have begun a project seeking to design a kit to cheaply convert second hand 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 breaking, 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 anonymised 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."

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