The first all-electric Google Street View car is a Jaguar I-PACE in Dublin, Ireland.

There is another cool connection between Ireland & United Kingdom now. Being a hyper-cool geek, I was of course referring to Radiohead singing about floating down Liffey in How To Disappear Completely. The latest connection though, is the usage of a through & through English thoroughbred Jaguar I-PACE as a world-first all electric Google Street View car. To simplify it, a Google Street View car is a vehicle with cameras & mapping technologies attached, which simply drives down streets, roads, highways & everything else to map them. So when you ‘look’ for a place on Google Maps & find it in great quality in Street View, chances are, a car with some of the most sophisticated tracking tech has driven through. Is it the best job ever? I agree. Google celebrated 10 years of Street View with this video linked below, which further shows what these cars do.

However this integration between Jaguar & Google goes above & beyond. Because Google has further partnered with Dublin City Council as part of its Environmental Insights Explorer’s Air Quality Programme to map hyperlocal air quality insights for cities to take action on their climate and health. And so Jaguar Land Rover engineers have not only worked to integrate Google Street View technology into the vehicle, by including new roof mountings for the Street View camera, a new rear-window glass which allows for wiring and redesigned interior switchgear to incorporate Google Street View controls, the car has been further equipped with specialised mobile air sensors developed by Aclima. ‘Air View Dublin’ will capture data over the next 12 months in the streets of Dublin. Google’s scientific research partners will analyse the data and develop maps of street-level air pollution. Google and Dublin City Council hope access to this data will help scientists, researchers and policymakers as they study air quality, as well as encourage people to make small but informed daily changes to help improve it.

In my personal opinion, two very cool things about this development,

• The bane of Air Pollution shall be tracked by a car that in itself generates zero tailpipe pollution. The I-PACE is completely electric. It’s the cornerstone of Jaguar’s next phase of focus on electric mobility.
• It was also the 2019 World Car Of The Year. It was also the 2019 World Car Design Of The Year. It was also the 2019 World Green Car.