A French organisation charged with reducing fuel consumption has produced an interesting report on the perceived value of driving style feedback and improvement systems. For me, the most significant part of this study was that it was conducted on private motorists rather than commercial fleets.
In the case of private motorists, I suspect that the savings available due to the lack of mileage, the profile of driving give a perceived small saving for customers. For example, if you spend 100 per month on fuel for your car, an 8% saving is interesting, but it seems to be not enough for a private motorist to change their driving style.
Driving style feedback systems are becoming more common. We now have displays on our dashboards that give us feedback on cornering g-forces or how smoothly we are braking. This not only provides driver coaching but collects vehicle data to provide feedback to key stakeholders including management.
The study surveyed people in 11 European countries:
- Spain: 615
- Portugal: 367
- Norway: 124
- Finland: 125
- Belgium: 303
- France: 675
- Slovenia: 145
- Croatia: 121
- Austria: 287
- Switzerland: 130
- Germany: 2915
- Total: 5807
The conclusion of the survey was that whilst private motorists believed that the technology would improve their fuel consumption, they were not interested in paying for it. One of the other surprising facts to emerge was that the private motorists were not very concerned about potential privacy issues of having their driving activity recorded. This is pretty consistent with what we see with GPS tracking, once the system is implemented correctly there is rarely a problem with privacy issues. I would like to see the results of this survey was re-run across Europe focused on commercial vehicles.
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Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
