FIAT EcoDrive powered by Microsoft

After Steve Ballmer made his charismatic speech at the Next Web Now! conference at the Crown Plaza in Milan, a series of complimentary panelists took over the stage depicting various success stories and testimonials. One of the stories presented was Fiat’s new EcoDrive solution.

I have to say I really enjoyed the presentation not only for its overall fresh and jovial tonality, but also for the way in which Fiat went about structuring this new concept. The EcoDrive is a system which collects data from your car in terms of how well you’re performing in reducing CO2 emissions. While you’re driving, this information is simultaneously stored on a USB flash drive which can then be plugged into your PC for further review. Basically, the system watches how you drive along with the road conditions you drive in and once your journey is over, it offers you feedback regarding what you should and should not do in order to reduce impact on the environment.

Simply awesome. The minute you get home or arrive to the office, you plug your key into your PC which will immediately display a carbon footprint of your trip highlighting the points where you could have, for instance- maintained a steady speed by using cruise control instead of increasing your speed- or breaking gently on the curves and not changing gears all the time. The system then gives you an overall performance score out of 100, which you can use to set your goals for the coming day, week, month or year.  Mind you this whole system is also good to help you save up on gas, so you might want to think twice about simulating the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ on the speedway.

How does this relate to Microsoft? Simple. The technology was developed by the Microsoft Auto platform which was then altered by Fiat in order to adapt it to its entire range of cars through their own technology known as Blue&Me™.

Once again, the two corporations partnered up to create yet another brilliant solution, now available in certain Fiat models, destined to transform people’s reckless driving style into more of an ‘eco friendly’ one. Let’s hope-.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Other Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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