More Than Living

Fiat 500 eco:Drive system is a neat (if nerdy) way to green your driving habits

There are plenty of car man­u­fac­tur­ers boast­ing about the eco-​​credentials of their latest models these days. But I came across one this week­end which genu­inely impressed me.

The Fiat 500 is a funky little town car – it echoes the cute style queues of earlier Fiats with the same number back in the 1960s and early 70s.

All well and good. It’s cer­tainly a nice look­ing creation.

But what I think is a genu­inely smart innov­a­tion is the eco:Drive system that comes with latest models.

eco:Drive helps you under­stand the impact of your driv­ing style on fuel con­sump­tion and CO2 emis­sions. You just plug a USB stick into the port on the car’s dash­board and eco:Drive records detailed inform­a­tion about the vehicle and how it is driven onto the USB stick.

Then down­load the free eco:Drive soft­ware from Fiat’s web­site and install on your com­puter. Plug the USB stick into your com­puter and the eco:Drive soft­ware ana­lyses the data on it and con­verts it into useful facts and fig­ures. It gives you your ‘eco:Drive index’ – a mark out of 100 show­ing how effi­ciently you’ve been driv­ing based on your accel­er­a­tion, decel­er­a­tion, gear changes and speed. It then makes recom­mend­a­tions about how you can improve the effi­ciency of your driving.

It even provides inform­a­tion on how much money this could save you. And for the ser­i­ously obsess­ive it lets you set your­self tar­gets and see if you can meet them.

Fiat sug­gests you could reduce your fuel bills by up to 15%. That’s a big saving!

The soft­ware will evolve and improve with feed­back from users – auto­mat­ic­ally updat­ing as time goes on too.

A genu­inely bril­liant idea. My one cri­ti­cism is that it feels very blokey indeed – even a tad nerdy. At the risk of sound­ing sexist, I wonder if girl-​​drivers – who tend to be the more eco-​​friendly of the sexes when it comes to driv­ing and are prob­ably more likely to buy a small funky car like the Fiat 500 – would ever bother to use it?

IMAGES: by Flickr user

ral­phbijker and Fiat

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​12-​​02 04:50:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Automobile, Automotive industry, Chrysler, ElectricVehicle, Fiat, Fiat 500, Recreation, United States
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