Hackathon: car2go | Relay — Meg McLaughlin

Relay is the winning submission of the the MobilityX Hackathon presented by car2go.

By incentivizing drivers to enter their destination with the lure of a Fare Estimator, we have the opportunity to match drivers with cars to drivers needing cars and eliminate the fear of finding a parking spot. Joining a Relay will save drivers time walking and parking, and gives each car more time earning money for car2go rather than sitting reserved and idle.

How it works:

car2go|relay

Mark is about ready to head home from his happy hour, but since there aren’t any cars close by, he sets a radar.

Meg is heading out soon and reserves a car. She enters her destination to get a fare estimate & chooses to start a Relay to save a few bucks and not have to search for parking.

Mark gets a notification that a Relay is on the way to his location, ETA: 15 minutes. He accepts.

Meg gets a ping about their Relay Point, about 2 blocks from where she’s headed.

Meg drives to the Relay Point while Mark wraps up and heads outside.

When Meg pulls up and sees Mark, she presses “End trip” on her phone to pass the baton to Mark, and walks over to meet her friends.

Mark hits “Start Trip” and takes off to the next Relay Point.

Brainstorming:

The team consisted of Mark Phillip and myself. I worked as the team's UX Designer and illustrator, and Mark was our developer.

As avid car2go fans, Mark and I were psyched to get to work on creating an idea to improve the service. We spent some time Friday night after the hackathon opening brainstorming a general direction: link rides together to keep cars in use longer.

Brainstorming doodles.

We worked on our vision for the next day and a half, spending a lot of time mulling over the drivers' motivation: if I'm headed downtown, I see the motivation to potentially skip parking, but if I'm headed to Hyde Park where parking won't be a problem, why would I use this? We came up with the idea of a fare estimator that would appear once you've reserved a car. Folks could always take the car as usual, but a cheaper fare and the promise of not having to find parking may be enough to encourage drivers to start a Relay and keep that car moving. We hope to continue working on this project and test our ideas.

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Simple Wireframes showing the addition of a fare estimate.

View The Working Prototype:

Click around our prototype: reserve cars, put in a destination and view fare estimates.

The prototype was built by Mark Phillip almost solely with Javascript, on an Apache server with MySQL persisting radar data. We relied on multiple products in the Google Maps suite, including the stock Maps, Place Autocomplete, Directions, and Geocode APIs.

The "I'm excited that we won" gallery:

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Many thanks to car2go, MobilityX, and the Capital Factory! My first hackathon was a blast.

Photo credits: Left @CFMobilityX, Center and Right @car2goAustin