CocoCar

An eco and wallet friendly way to commute

Comment

Inspiration

We knew Ubers and taxis tend to be veeery expensive, and sometimes commuting by public transportation can be draining and exhausting, leaving you with half of your total energy even before starting your day. Of course, the principal problem is that going by car to your destination leaves an impressively devastating carbon footprint, considering some families have a car for each member.

What it does

Our project, CocoCar, is a collaborative effort by daily commuters to promote carpooling. It matches clients that have similar itineraries and/or common paths taken for their everyday travels, and links them with a driver that either has to reach that destination as well, or simply works as a carpool transporter. Rides become cheaper from sharing the fee between the clients, and drivers win from sharing their vehicle and limiting general carbon footprint.

How we built it

We used Flutter for the app, front and back end, and JavaScript for the algorithm pairing clients with drivers on an appropriate itinerary.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into compatibility difficulties while trying to implement a firebase backend, so we resolved to another local solution for the demo. In addition, none of our members had previous experience with Flutter, but we pushed through to make our android app as intuitive as possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming up with a great project idea for sustainable development and managing to build a prototype with frameworks and technologies new to us.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the Flutter framework and mobile app development in general, which was a first for most of us. We also learned to work with the Google Maps API and all the methods it allows.

What's next for CocoCar

We intend on pushing our app towards a Firebase server. We also intend on collecting data about how our app users behave and analyze that data to optimize our algorithm for finding the best driver - client match.

Share this project:

Updates