Google Maps: Eco-friendly Navigation of Gas Diesel & Electricity vehicles

Image of Google Maps displaying an eco-friendly route, along with information on how much gas it’ll use compared to a less fuel-efficient way will definitely going to help travelers.

You can tell maps if you have petrol, diesel, hybrid, or electric car.

Google is extending Maps’ eco-friendly routing mode, rolling the feature out in dozens of European countries and making it even more potent by allowing you to choose what fuel your car runs on.

Initially pitched in the US and Canada last year, the feature will emphasize routes that use less energy if they have a comparable ETA to other alternate routes. Google says that commencing today, it is rolling out to users in “nearly 40” European nations, including France, Poland, Spain, Ireland, and the UK.

Google’s also adding the capability to tell Maps if your car has a hybrid, diesel, gas, or electric powertrain. Consequently, it can find the most efficient route for your specific type of vehicle and provide more accurate estimates on how much more efficient the eco-friendly way is.

The system is built on information pulled from the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and European Environment Agency, combined with Google Maps driving trends to train machine learning models based on the most popular engines in given regions.

Using an example from Google’s blog post, this could mean that people with diesel-powered vehicles will be routed along a high-speed freeway, where their engines will be most efficient. In contrast, someone with a hybrid or electric car might get suggestions, including surface streets where they can take the better edge of regenerative braking.

Google Maps is an internet mapping forum and consumer application delivered by Google. It provides satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic Street View, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for touring by bike, foot, car, air, and public transportation. As of 2020, Google Maps was being utilized by over 1 billion people globally every month.

Google Maps started as a C++ desktop program conceived by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen of Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was obtained by Google, which converted it into an internet application. After additional assets of a geospatial data visualization company and a real-time traffic analyzer, Google Maps was established in February 2005. The service’s front end utilizes JavaScript, XML, and Ajax.

Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites and is a locator for businesses and organizations worldwide. Google Map Maker allowed users to expand and update the service’s mapping worldwide collaboratively but was discontinued in March 2017. However, crowdsourced assistance to Google Maps was not suspended as the company revealed those features would be transmitted to the Google Local Guides program.

Google Maps satellite view is a bird’s-eye view, or you may call it “top-down,” most of the high-resolution imagery of metropolia is aerial photography taken from an airplane flying at 800 to 1,500 feet, while most other imagery is from satellites. Much of the available satellite imagery is no more than three years old and is updated regularly.

Google Maps earlier used a variant of the Mercator projection and could not accurately show spaces around the poles. The desktop rendition of Google Maps was updated in August 2018 to establish a 3D globe. However, switching back to the 2D map in the settings is still possible.