Recharging your Daily Commute

Every Commute is Unique:
Every urban commute is unique in many ways: speeds, distance, traffic, hills, driver behavior. If we build intelligent algorithms and power systems that adapt to each commute, the cost of driving can drop much more than a one-size-fits-all solution.

Use Real Data: We need solutions
for real commutes, so let's collect as much real data as possible. This website makes open collection and sharing of real-world driving data as easy and widespread as possible.

Engineer the Whole System: Many researchers and car companies are conducting outstanding research on specific components of electric cars, such as motors and batteries. We are doing complementary work by optimizing the entire power management system rather than concentrating on the individual component designs. This allows us to address the question: Can we use today's batteries, computers and supercapacitors to create far less costly intelligent electric vehicles?

Include Everyone: ChargeCar is as much a social challenge as an engineering challenge. We want to involve you: collecting and sharing your commute data to contribute to accurate real-world commuting models to develop better intelligent control algorithms.

Reuse: In addition to lowering the costs for commercially-developed electric vehicles, we are dedicated to practical conversion of existing cars, extending their usability. One of our goals is a conversion and customization process that empowers local mechanics and garages to be community-supported centers for an affordable urban electric vehicle revolution.

Open the Hood: The combination supercapacitor-battery architecture has the potential for large gains in efficiency and large drops in overall cost of ownership. But to realize this potential we need whole new algorithms for using all the available data, from topography to driver behavior, to manage power intelligently. We pledge to openly share our algorithms and models so that everyone can collaborate continually on better solutions.