Rewarding good drivers with reduced travel costs

Rewarding good drivers with reduced
travel costs is the idea behind a new Ford mobility experiment
that takes a similar approach to achieving goals as that employed by fitness
and exercise apps.
Project
The Ford-led Driver Behaviour Project explores
providing drivers with a
personal score, based on various driver inputs, and accessed via a prototype
driving app. For drivers who achieve a good score, this could lead to cheaper
car-hire and car‑sharing, and provide insurers with information required to
support discounts.
Drive Smarter
“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. “We wanted to better understand how people use our products so we
could help them to improve that behaviour – and a score, combined with
guidance, makes it easier to improve.”
Fiestas
Over a four-month period, plug-in devices gathered data from
more than 40 Ford Fiestas, driven by volunteers
in London, to record every action that each driver took over 160,000 kilometres
and more than 4,000 hours. This included detailing the slightest turn of the
steering wheel and harsh braking, as well as time of day, weather, and road
history.
Data
Ford’s perspective is that customers own their data and the
company is exploring ways that customers can use this data to their advantage.
For this project, the vehicle data empowers drivers with their personal
driving score, based on activities such as steady acceleration and steering
smoothly.
Insights
The app enables drivers to see how different driving behaviours
affected that score, and offers insights to help improve – such as driving in
the correct gear. It also calculates a score for each journey based on the
driver’s interaction with the vehicle, as judged via the data received on
accelerating, braking, and steering. The score changes according to the results
of each journey, with a graph showing the trend over time, enabling drivers to
see on which days their scores were higher or lower.
Analysis
Both Ford’s data scientists and transport data experts,
Transport API, will analyse the data to gain further insights. In addition to
the vehicle-specific data, global design company IDEO was engaged to research
what people say, think, feel and do when behind the wheel. This showed a
significant difference between how people think they drive, and how they
actually do drive.
Profile
“From the vehicle data and research gathered, we were able to test an internally developed, highly advanced driving score algorithm. The score could be used to develop a mobility profile, enabling drivers to save money on services tailored to their needs,” Scott added.