A Foraging-based Approach to Optimise Pervasive Design for Electric Mobility Choices in Charsharing

Electric vehicle carsharing offers high potential to decrease CO2-Emissions in personal transportation and further increase the acceptance of electric vehicle technology. To make carsharing with electric vehicles available to an increased population, suppliers have to be confident in the economic feasibility and a sufficiently high usage of the electric fleet

Currently, a general lack of information prevents the adoption of electric vehicles additionally to decision factors like vehicle range and might overshadow a motivation for pro-environmental behaviour.

To decrease the impact a lack of information could have and investigate the potential of the information foraging theory in pervasive display design, the information-foraging based approach for pervasive multi-tile displays by Montoya Freire et al. was applied to maximise the information gain from vehicle properties displayed in online carsharing vehicle profiles. This approach was chosen to investigate whether foraging-based pervasive design could increase the frequency of BEV usage in Carsharing relative to CVs.

Next to generally maximising information gain, a second approach was modified to specifically increase informational needs depending on the vehicle type displayed, which was either a battery-operated Vehicle (BEV) or a conventional vehicle (CV). Although subjects reported no increased preference for booking an electric vehicle when information gain was generally maximised, the specialised approach proved to be successful in predicting an increased or decreased likelihood for subjects to choose a BEV or CV.