Eco-Driving from the Perspective of Behavioral Economics: Implications for Supporting User-Energy Interaction

Eco-driving can essentially be regarded as driver behavior targeted towards increased energy efficiency. As such, eco-drivers have an impact on fuel efficiency when selecting a vehicle (strategic eco-driving), selecting routes (tactical eco-driving) as well as selecting eco-driving strategies (operational eco-driving). On the operational level, a key task for electric vehicle drivers is to decide how to control and interact with the system-inherent energy flows (i.e., user-energy interaction). With the control of the energy flows, drivers convert energies into each other with the goal of achieving optimal energy efficiency. Consequently, user-energy interaction can be regarded as a regulation of energy resources that is composed of a series of economic decisions. Therefore, we examine economic decision-making as a framework for understanding drivers' eco-driving decisions on the strategic, tactical and operational level of ecodriving. So far economic decision-making has been most extensively studied with the resource money creating a whole research discipline, namely behavioral economics. A plethora of research has indicated that humans tend to use heuristics and succumb to fallacies when making economic decisions. Therefore, we describe heuristics and biases that have been identified for driver behavior and that are relevant to eco-driving. Based on these, we discuss possible implications of the behavioral economics perspective for user-energy interaction. Opportunities to support drivers' user-energy interaction on the levels of eco-driving and directions for future research are highlighted.