Renault’s ZOE Writes Jack Kerouac Fan Fiction

According to agency Edelman Deportivo, one of the major obstacles to widespread adoption of electric vehicles is “range anxiety,” or the fear of how far can you go before needing to charge up. Renault’s ZOE seems to be doing a good job of addressing this question with its range of 400 kilometers (or a less impressive-sounding 248.5 miles).

In order to illustrate what 400 kilometers of driving really means, the Renault team had ZOE write a modern interpretation of Jack Kerouac’s classic work “On The Road” with the help of artificial intelligence and real-time driving data.

To accomplish this, a ZOE was equipped with a Raspberry Pi to collect information (like speed, acceleration and use of lights) from sensors on the car via an OBD-II scanner, along with GPS and 4G modem.

These readings were then combined with external APIs for weather, nearby places and geo-positioning to determine the tone of a Jack Kerouac story, which is generated by IBM Watson and read back to the driver using Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech technology. When the ride is complete, a thermal printer also prints out a tangible copy of the fanfic.

What’s really neat is that the sensor data actually decides which way the story unfolds. For instance, if the driver goes slowly, the story takes one path, and if it’s raining, it takes another. As seen in the video below, results can actually be pretty entertaining! Be sure to check out the project’s page here for more.

[h/t Creativity Online]