EcoCar3 is the latest Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition (AVTC), hosted by General Motors (GM) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The main goal of the project is to convert a Chevy Camaro into a plug-in electric hybrid to reduce its impact on the environment. The competition takes place over four years and involves teams from multiple departments: Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Science.

As the Computer Science team, we created the center display unit for the vehicle. Our user interface is a PC application written in Qt, a cross-platform development environment. The application replaces all physical buttons in the car, allowing the user to easily control basic functions in the car with a touchscreen display. The user can also monitor information about the car, such as ambient temperature and battery state of charge. Our application will require minimal adaptation when it is integrated with the vehicle in the future years of the competition.