In-Car Fuel Mileage Electronic Relay to the Cloud?

The other day, I was talking to an acquaintance who helps wire homes, specifically smart homes with broadband access. He puts the wires in the wall and makes everything work. Many of the homes the he wires up have been long-standing, some of them were built in the 1950s for instance. It's time for those residents to upgrade, and he puts in all of the new technology for them.

It's interesting these days as people's refrigerators are becoming smarter than they are, and the same is happening with our cars, soon they will be driving themselves. In fact our cars are going to be so smart, maybe they can take our tests in school from the parking lot, just kidding, you don't want to get caught cheating. Okay so let's talk a little bit about some of the latest cool in-car gadgetry.

There was an interesting article on March 28, 2013 in the Wall Street Journal titled; "Auto Makers Try to Tackle Inaccuracies Measuring MPG," which discussed how different drivers with different driving habits, different areas were reporting different mileage results, some more and some less than the actual MPG on the sticker when they bought their automobile. As you will recall there have been some rather high profile federal regulatory lawsuits over false advertising and MPG estimates by automakers.

Ford is asking APP makers to come up with something that will relay actual data to their cloud servers via smart phones according to that article. I think that is a wise idea, in fact, I'd like to have one, unfortunately, currently I do not own a Ford automobile, but I have had Ford cars and trucks in the past.

Just think if you were at the beach, and you needed to get some more pizza, beer, and snacks. Wouldn't it be nice to simply use your iPhone to call your car, put in the request by text message, and your car would drive to the store, contact the clerk inside, have all the goodies brought out and put in the car, and pay for it all just as you would with an iPhone payment app?

Now then, back to the story above, we all want to know what our true miles per gallon average is, and we need to be able to adjust our driving habits and behavior to optimize our fuel economy. By doing that we can save money, and at four dollars per gallon for gasoline, everyone is into that. Meanwhile, it will keep the automakers honest, and let us consumers know where we really stand. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it