Are Truck Drivers Ready to Save Fuel? The Objective and Subjective Effectiveness of an Ecological Driver Assistance System

This paper addresses ecological driving of manually driven heavy duty vehicles with the help of an Ecological Driver Assistance System (EDAS). The proposed solution estimates an ecological vehicle control based on predictive information from a digital map to give sustainable eco-driving recommendations over a Human Machine Interface (HMI) to the driver. The main contribution is an extensive study with N = 24 professional truck drivers conducted in public traffic to evaluate system performance in terms of economy, safety, comfort, and acceptance. Thereby, two different configurations of the EDAS were compared to the series condition, one with a graphical dashboard only and a second configuration with an additional haptic acceleration pedal. Vehicle data as well as subjective variables were recorded. Statistical analysis showed a significant increase of both the objective and subjective system performance in all four parameter sets for both configurations in comparison to the series condition. Nevertheless, the haptic acceleration pedal yielded even better results than the graphical presentation alone. Altogether, the study proved that drivers are willing to save fuel if they are supported by an EDAS.