Three Slavs and One German

Inspiration

We want a more sustainable, efficient and friendly world that's why we decided to create the solution for most of the problems we face with using car renting or sharing services with electric cars.

What it does

Car rental companies want to electrify their fleet. With that comes a lot of challenges. One of them is that charging electric cars takes a lot of time and if many customers return their cars at the same time, there can be no charging spots left.

Since there is a limited number of charging spots we propose to distribute customers to different public charging spots when returning the car if the chargers at the rental station are occupied. This way, all vehicles can be charged and customers might also find a return location closer to their home.

We created an app that finds available charging stations and shows the best route there. The charging station data is provided by Open Street Maps and Stadtwerke München. We also created a working simulation of rental cars driving around Munich, being rented and returned.

To get vehicles back to the rental station, we propose to offer this as an opportunity for SIXT ride drivers. Currently, they are required to have their own car to offer rides to customers. In our app, SIXT drivers can see cars at the charging stations, can pick them up, use them for SIXT ride for a few hours and then bring it to a SIXT station. Our innovative business plan helps to reduce car ownership and contributes to a greener planet.

How we built it

For the frontend, we used Vue.js, Tailwind and Google Maps API. The backend simulation is built with python, numpy and geopy. Server runs on Flask.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating the backend together with the frontend. Using Google Maps API with Vue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a working app! The frontend part looks beautiful. We learned new technologies on the go. We are proud of the teamwork.

What we learned

We learned that a good problem specification is the most critical thing when solving any task, so that we are sure that we satisfy our customer's actual needs. This hackathon also served as a refresher course on the graph theory, data structures and front end design which we all enjoyed. The final take away from this problem is that it is not that simple as it might initially seem and companies will need to collaborate between them selves if we want to save the planet.

What's next for Three Slavs and One German

In the future our team will aim to integrate the simulator, and hopefully real time data into our system which would then determine the optimal charging station in real time. This would enable us to achieve an uber like system for relocating cars between charging stations depending on the customer needs. As the finish touch we also aim to employ real time energy prices (european energy exchange etc.) to schedule the cars for charging when the electricity is the cheapest and the overhead of electricity is coming from renewable energy souces not fossil fuels.