TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Ford intends on using web services to make their cars more efficient:

McGee believes the computing power available on the Internet will allow cars to become smarter. Last spring, at the annual Google I/O conference in San Francisco, McGee announced a deal to use the search giant’s prediction algorithms—online software that analyzes large data sets to spot trends. Ford’s idea is to send data from your car to Google’s data centers, which would then predict where you are headed every time you key the ignition. Google might predict, say, that there’s a 59.24 percent chance you’re headed over to Bob’s house. A hybrid car might use a map of low-emission zones to determine when to switch to battery power as you drive. Or the algorithm could pick a fuel-efficient path with few hills, no rain, and the least traffic.

“Fuel optimization depends on the topography, traffic patterns, and how a customer drives their car,” says McGee. “The cloud will allow us to use these three data points that historically were not aligned in real time.”

This is all talk, of course, but it’s a very good idea. One of the biggest jumps we can make this century in innovation and efficiency is capturing all of the data we never have before, and use it to make better decisions. When we drive a particular place, we all have a route we feel to be the most efficient way to get there. While it might really be the most efficient, we don’t have a good way to verify it. We base that mostly on our own intuition, rather than actual data.

Individually, these changes might not mean much to us. A few seconds, a small fraction of a gallon less gas (or of battery capacity), and a bit less emissions. But in the aggregate, those small amounts add up.

There’s bigger gains to be had, too, if we move toward autonomous cars. Imagine fleets of autonomous cars-for-rent that, when you request one in an app, it shows up to your house in minutes, ready to take you wherever you need to go. If that becomes reality, and it’s affordable, there’s little need for families to own multiple cars, because most of their needs can be handled by a rented car. That reduces the number of cars on the road, which means less emissions, less congestion, and more open parking spaces.

(Via Rebecca Rosen.)