An electric car has completed a 1,000-mile trip from
Kansas City to Washington D.C., using a unique form of fuel: social
media.
Using Facebook Likes and Twitter retweets, 17 high school students
and eight mentors completed the trip in a 1967 Karmann Ghia, tech site Mashable reported. "We took a long time trying to figure out how to convert social media into the wattage that we needed," Mashable quoted Linda Buchner, the president and cofounder of Minddrive, as saying.
Minddrive is an educational non-profit program that uses hands-on projects to teach at-risk kids about math and science.
It organized the trip, which Bucher described as both exhausting and the time of her life.
For the trip, Minddrive assigned wattage values to social interactions, such as:
a follow on Twitter: 5 watts a Like on Facebook: 1 watt signing an online petition: 10 watts shares, retweets or Twitter mentions: 3 watts
But Mashable said the trip, dubbed the "social fuel tour," was also about social media and awareness.
It said the Ghia was equipped with an Arduino device that monitored social media activity. This in turn triggered the vehicle’s motor, based on the number of tweets and posts about the project.
Buchner said a test-launch in Kansas City before the trip netted 225,000 watts, which Mashable said was three times what they expected.
She said this gave them enough "fuel" to get to Washington D.C. and beyond. — TJD, GMA News
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