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.