危 wēi  danger

Driving in an environmentally sound way is often perceived to be boring.  Frequently, consumers have good intentions but don’t follow through in their actions.  This is in part because other, more significant behaviours and needs overtake their best intentions – not least the desire to get to their destination quickly.  With Nissan investing so much in more efficient petrol and electric vehicles, these other consumer behaviours are in danger of limiting environmental benefit.

机 jī opportunity

Nissan has realized that harnessing these other consumer behaviours might provoke their customers to drive greener. Accordingly, Nissan and the city of Yokohama plan to offer an iPhone application that’s intended to encourage local residents to drive more efficiently. The application links to the car over a Wi-Fi connection and monitors the driving behaviour. The data is continuously uploaded to a central server, where it’s compared to optimal driving profiles to rate the user’s driving in three areas on a scale from one to five. The application also delivers summaries, enabling drivers to compete and try and improve on their own scores.

How about:

• Harnessing existing human behaviours rather than having to create new ones?
• Harnessing technology to benchmark performance and encourage the desired behaviour change?

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