Futurist, filmmaker and theCUBE alumnus Jason Silva predicts that sensory data will help reshape our individual and collective destinies, improving our lives in “ways we could never have conceived before.” But while Silva’s Human 2.0 revolution will likely remain in science fiction for the foreseeable future, self-tuning cars that can achieve better performance by tapping into the power of real time information are right around the corner.

Splunk and Ford Motors have joined forces to provide a sneak peek of things to come through Connected Car Dashboards, a collaborative experiment in aggregating data from vehicles. As part of the project, the companies equipped a Ford Focus Electric and a gas-powered Ford Escape with OpenXC sensory equipment to gain new insight into how drivers act in different traffic situations.

“The Connected Car Dashboards give a glimpse into a promising future in which data could transform vehicle and driver safety as well as design, productivity and other areas of the automotive industry,” said Christy Wilson, the vice president of product operations at Splunk. “Splunk’s mission is to make machine data more accessible, valuable and usable to everyone, and Splunk4Good [the company’s corporate social responsibility program] extends those goals by using data to make a difference. Splunk is thrilled to be working with Ford to help usher in an open data movement in the automotive industry.”

Splunk and Ford found that the three drivers who participated in the study all displayed reckless behavior in the electric vehicle when starting from a stop. The drivers reached their top speeds in the gas vehicle, which revealed that the best place for police to place a speed trap in San Francisco, where the experiment was conducted, would be on 3rd Street.