Google has decided to invest into hybrids and other green cars. And invest they did. Google put $10 million dollars towards improvements such as parking garages where employees can plug in their electric cars and power up their batteries via solar energy.

From the Google website:

Google has created a small demonstration fleet of plug-in hybrids and eventually plans to include over 100 plug-in hybrids in its corporate fleet as demand grows and cars become commercially available. Google.org has contracted with Hymotion to retrofit 4 Toyota Priuses and 2 Ford Escapes. Google.org is demonstrating the capabilities of this technology, collecting actual data on the performance of these vehicles, and making this information available to the public. All of these cars are outfitted with data recording devices that track technical and environmental performance, use patterns and charging history. You can see the actual data which is uploaded from the vehicles. Both electricity and gasoline use data is being used to calculate the total energy use for each vehicle to get ‘real world’ performance data on these cars. In order to compare this data to other cars under similar conditions, we are equipping existing stock hybrids and conventional cars with the same data recording devices. With this data, we hope to be able to measure the mileage of plug-in hybrids vs. conventional gas and hybrid vehicles under realistic driving conditions. To date, our plug-in hybrids are averaging about 75 miles per gallon of gasoline which is four times that of the average car on the road in the US today.

It’s great to see such a large and influential company taking green initiatives like these!

via [psfk]