Situation awareness in eco-driving

An increasing number of vehicles provide feedback on eco-driving; information whose purpose it is to increase fuel efficiency in driving. The development of this feedback is relatively novel and there are currently no standards or long-term insights into best design strategies (e.g. leading to a permanent improvement in driving style). In this paper, we discuss the unexplored relevance of situation awareness (SA) research for eco-driving feedback, highlighting in particular that eco-driving feedback has to be understood as intricately tied into SA. Specifically, we argue that, for the purpose of promoting eco-friendly driving behaviour, the relevant information needs to be part of a driver SA without interfering with safety-critical aspects. We show that this requires ecofeedback systems to possess, themselves, a SA of the traffic situation. This lends support to arguments that SA in a road traffic context is different from SA in the military or aviation domain and takes on a more distributed nature. We conclude by suggesting that head-up displays are a particularly promising interface technology with which to implement the suggestions provided here.