If you want to minimize greenhouse gas emissions, following the shortest route from your navigation system isn't the best idea. Neither is the quickest road.

Swedish researchers from the Lund Institute of Technology have created and tested a GPS navigation system programmed to work out the most "efficient" route. In the streets of Lund, the three women proved that their system can calculate routes that are significantly less polluting than the standard options. An average fuel saving of 8,2% in one area, 8,2% less pollution. Eva Ericsson (the boss) estimates that 4% is more realistic for a global use.

To develop the all thing, the team assigned fuel consumption factors for 3 types of car on 22 streets in the digital map database. To get there, they merged information on thoses streets: width, speed limit, typical traffic flows in both peak and off-peak hours.

But the suppliers of digital maps are more skeptics. By Navteq for example, assign a fuel factor to every street would be too expensive. But they imagine probe vehicles that would transmit data on their fuel consumption as they travel around so one can use them in real time or store them as historical data.


Source: NewScientistTech, yesterday.