Flex-fuel smart selector, a proposal for an efficient mobility 2018-36-0036

Society sees itself in an era in which ecological and sustainability issues have assumed great importance, and with that, several issues need to be revised. When it comes to mobility, a key point is to determine the most efficient way to travel a certain distance with the lowest cost and environmental impact. Due to the size of the world fleet of vehicles, it is easy to understand how an increase of efficiency of the internal combustion engines (ICE) lead to a reduction of the total volume of fuel consumed in the planet. That combined to the possibility of integration with an online network, showing the flow conditions of each road, would allow a further reduction of the fuel consumed globally as well as a mitigation of the emission of harmful gases to the environment associated to urban mobility.

In Brazil, the automobile fleet consists of approximately 60% of Flex-Fuel vehicles, which can use either ethanol or gasoline. Despite of the fact that the biofuel is renewable and less aggressive to the environment, its wide use throughout the country still faces several obstacles in conquering the user's preference. The price parity between ethanol and gasoline associated with the lack of knowledge of which fuel would be the ideal for minimizing both the cost of the traveled distance and the environmental impact is one of the main reasons. Failures due to poor vehicle maintenance and fuel low quality are also responsible for limiting its wide use.

The work here described is a proposal to help the driver to use his vehicle more efficiently and ecologically. Vehicle telemetry data continuously transmitted and processed in the cloud allows precise and reliable information on the vehicle's real life performance and maintenance, as well as on the quality of the fuel, to be displayed to the driver. The efficient use of automobiles, the replacement of fossil fuels by biofuels, the preventive and predictive maintenance of the vehicles, and the use of better quality fuels are values applied to mobility that relate to the goals proposed by the RenovaBio program.