While Google is busy being a power company, a cleantech VC and an all-round eco do-gooder, the search giant is also working on its plug-in electric vehicle project, on which it plans to spend $10 million and has converted four Toyota Priuses and two Ford Escape hybrids to plug-in cars. Last week, good ol’ Googs launched a blog to follow its electric vehicle project and track the industry.

As you can see from the data above, Google is tracking all of the cars to figure out how productive plug-ins really are. The system uses a laptop to collect data on speed, distance driven, fuel use and battery info, and uploads the data via a wireless data card to Google’s servers. GPS is also used to plot geography and potentially measure the performance at different altitudes…

Katie Fehrenbacher’s point – is the value of transparency. Publishing in-progress data in a project like this is useful to folks interested in all aspects of the tech.