Driving behavior prompting framework for improving fuel efficiency

With escalating fuel prices, limited fossil fuel reserves and increasing carbon emissions, significant efforts are being made to decrease fuel consumption in vehicles. While, drivetrain improvements play a major role in improving fuel economy, it has been identified that fuel efficient driving behavior is a viable method for increased fuel efficiency. Thus, if the optimal fuel efficient behavior can be identified, it can be used to increase the fuel efficiency of drivers. However, once the optimal fuel efficient behavior is identified, it has to be presented to the driver, while the vehicle is being driven. Thus, this method of information representation has to be un-obstructive and easy to comprehend. This paper presents a low cost framework and a hardware setup for prompting drivers on fuel efficient behavior. The presented framework includes an information rich, intuitive un-obstructive visualization. The presented method was implemented using low cost, commercial-off-the-shelf hardware and tested on a sample of buses selected from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) bus fleet. Different types of visual cues were and evaluated by professional drivers for obstructiveness, interpretability and intuitiveness.