Sunday, September 14, 2008

Google Electric Car RechargeIT program

Is there anything that Google's innovative technological brains have not touched? This past summer, they launched a company initiative called RechargeIT to promote the use of electric vehicles. Their initiative has benefits fort both their employees and the public. For their employees, Google has a stock of electric vehicles in the characteristic Google primary red, green, blue colors that employees can borrow for short trips around their campus. For the general public, Google has installed a digital card into these cars to gather data, which they will make public, measuring the miles per gallon, distance, CO2 emissions, battery life, and other data that currently is not widely- accessible. This would push them to the forefront of bringing "real data" on electric cars to the laymen, making it accessible for free and without subscription to a database. Dan Reicher, Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives at Google.org hosts several panel discussions on electric vehicles.