Originally Posted by Mithrandir

Never say never. I saw a demo of a Toyota Prius that some university students reprogrammed as their thesis. It was programmed to look at the gradients of the road you're on and automatically optimize fuel efficiency based on what terrain you're coming up on.

For example in a regular hybrid, the car uses a "greedy" algorithm which attempts to keep the hybrid battery charged to a certain level at all times, because it has no idea what terrain you're going to be taking it on. So if you go down a steep hill it will turn the engine off, but at some point on the hill, if it is long enough, it will have to turn on the gas engine again to prevent from overcharging the battery.

However with the intelligently programmed hybrid, it knows exactly how long the hill is, so it feels comfortable depleting more of the battery on the ride up the hill, so that when you're going down it can charge the entire thing without hitting 100%.

If you programmed the entire trip into the GPS beforehand, it got even more efficient because it can look beyond every turn you make. Something like a 20% energy savings just from having the computer know the terrain beforehand.


So never say never. I imagine it won't be too far in the future when your Di2 can talk to your Edge 500 and power meter using ANT+, and figure out exactly what the road ahead looks like, and what gearing would be optimal, if programmed with an optimal power output per pedal stroke beforehand. From a technical standpoint, there's nothing preventing this from being more efficient than you.

Less fun? Maybe. To each their own. But given enough tech, a computer can easily figure out more efficient shifting than you can.