Can offering people tangible rewards as well as praise help them break bad driving habits? That's the question Ford is attempting to answer via a new experiment that leverages elements of gamification plus fitness and activity tracking apps.
One of the ways that fitness apps are deemed to motivate their users to exercise more or to hit harder targets is by ‘rewarding' progress. The Ford-led Driver Behaviour Project, which is being conducted in London, turns entire vehicles into huge activity and behavior monitors for the same reason -- generating a driver ‘score'.
"Like an activity-tracking app that shows the distance we cover and calories we burn, a personal driver score encourages people to drive smarter," said Jonathan Scott, project lead, Ford Smart Mobility.
Ford equipped 40 Fiesta city cars with a plug-in sensors that volunteers drove around the English capital as their daily drivers over 4,000 hours and 160,000km. Every bit of data relating to steering wheel adjustments to brake pressure, the time of day and even the weather conditions was collected and analyzed against historical traffic flow for the roads in question via an app.
"We wanted to better understand how people use our products so we could help them to improve that behavior -- and a score, combined with guidance, makes it easier to improve," Scott said.
Using the app, the volunteer drivers can quickly see how their driving style ranks thanks to a personal score and more importantly, are able to understand how it could be improved, by smoother acceleration, or better gear selection, for example. And the data is such that users can see how they perform on individual journeys on different days and at different times.
As well as helping Ford design the next iteration of its passenger cars, the company believes the data could be used, with the drivers' permission, to create a ‘mobility profile' that could enable "drivers to save money on services tailored to their needs," Scott explained. So for instance, higher-scoring drivers could get access to cheaper car insurance, a discounted car rental rate or priority access to car-sharing or pooling services.
