Range anxiety
Luc Buijtels, Arnout Ulenberg, Sigi van Lindt (2019) in cooperation with XYZ Dynamics coached by Marieke Martens
Description
Zero Emission Zones (ZEZ’s) in city centres are being integrated on a larger scale throughout Europe in 2025. This requires commercial traffic to adjust their fleet of vehicles from diesel zero-emission alternatives. Because commercial electric vehicles are too expensive and don’t fulfill the requirements, our client, XYZ Dynamics, retrofits existing vehicles with a hybrid-electric drive train. This allows light commercial vehicles to continue operations in ZEZ’s Because XYZ innovates mostly on the technical side, we as designers were requested to research the most important parameters in communication with their users through an in-car interface. The study focused on the effect of range anxiety and trust towards the displayed information, to make sure the users of the retrofitted hybrid vehicles are not experiencing unnecessary stress during their job. The research turned out that users want to see their distance to destination with range to spare at the end of their trip.
