Popular Science has published a delightful article that describes how 2010 Honda Insight (a hybrid vehicle) uses some principles of video games to encourage more fuel efficient driving behavior. The car’s multi-information display includes a progress meter — a (leafless) virtual plant. The plant’s empty branches grow leaves over time, as a result of efficient driving behavior recorded by the car’s onboard computer. The multi-information display helps teach the driver how to drive more efficiently (and thus, gain leaves) by signaling the impact of excessive stopping and starting, inefficient acceleration, etc.

This isn’t a short-term game, either. Over the car’s entire lifetime, a thrifty driver can earn a second tier of leaves, then a flower on each branch. The screen will eventually display a trophy if a driver performs well enough for a long enough period of time.

What I like about this idea is not just that it makes fuel-efficient driving more fun. No, what I really like about this is that, if Honda is smart, they could turn this into an incentive to purchase more Honda vehicles in the future. After all, when the time comes to purchase another car, you wouldn’t want to lose the virtual trophy that you had worked so hard to earn, would you? Well, why should you have to lose it? Just purchase another vehicle from Honda, and all the trophies you earned in your previous vehicle can be transferred over to the new one! Of course, it would work better if you could earn trophies for more activities in addition to efficient driving (and it would work better still if the accumulation of trophies led to concrete real-world benefits, like a 5% discount on your next vehicle, a t-shirt with the Honda logo on it, etc…)

February 24th, 2009 | Category: Marketing & Advertising, Solving "Hard Problems" | Subscribe to comments | You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed