Driver interfaces for electric vehicles

Abstract

The dissemination of electric vehicles (EVs) is an important step towards a more sustainable transport system, but barriers to adoption persist. Much effort and resources are put into solving battery technology related issues and progress is made continuously. There remain however important matters that have not been equally discussed; the design of user interfaces and human-machine interaction (HMI) of EVs is one. This paper seeks to examine a few of the issues regarding EV HMI through a study that evaluates two different concepts for an EV instrument cluster in order to develop knowledge on (i) what information is relevant to present to the driver of an EV and (ii) how that information should be presented; innovatively or in a more familiar way. Two consecutive user tests, according to a between-subject procedure, were used to test two concepts in a driving simulator. Ten participants, with little or no experience of driving an electric or a hybrid electric vehicle, tested each concept. The participants were asked to drive the EV simulator and to interact with the user interface while different events were triggered, designed so that the participants would experience several of the situations that might appear when driving an EV for a longer period of time. Data was gathered through objective measurements, e.g. time, number if errors etc., as well as through questionnaires and interviewsThe results show that participants had problems understanding the EV specific information content independent of concepts, even though they considered the information shown to be the right one. Both concepts had advantages and disadvantages, most notably that participants expected the vehicle to work like a conventional car when the interface was traditional and that they felt insecure when the interface was innovative.Some of the discovered problems can be attributed to the participants' lack of knowledge and useful mental concepts regarding electricity and batteries, which made understanding the information difficult. More research on how to support EV drivers through design of the HMI given these deficiencies is needed.

Harvesting green miles from my roof

“…There is an increasing literature on HCI issues related to EVs [8,16,25,28,36,38] dealing for example with issues such as drivers worrying about whether their battery will last long enough to cover the distance they need to travel, referred to as range anxiety [15,16,32,24,26,23] or how to plan their route so that there are sufficient charging points [27]. Most of this research views the EV as a car that is hampered by limited range and the need for frequent recharging.…”

“…There is an increasing literature on HCI issues related to EVs [8,16,28,25,36,38] dealing for example with issues such as range anxiety [32,24,26,23] or EV route planning [27]. On the other hand, there is a plethora of work on home energy issues [1,10,5,4,31,11,34,30,22,18] with an emerging literature on HCI issues around solar generation [21,19,35] and selfconsumption [4,3,22].…”

Towards a driver supervision and assistance system: intention detecting and option providing

“…An interface that displays luminous signals able to be handled by peripheral vision while driving is developed in [7] to enhance the utility of ADAS. More specifically, Human Machine Interface (HMI) for electric vehicles (EV) is studied to develop the knowledge on what information should be present and how the information should be presented [8]. With the goal of protection against potential unsafe upcoming situations, a number of research activities have been stated to predict the future status of the system.…”

HMI development for a purpose-built electric taxi in Singapore

“…Besides speed, torque and odometer, the interface objects that are related to the electric vehicle characteristics (range, power, charging process and energy meter) are displayed. This encloses an appropriate data communication with the vehicle network, as well as a proper interface design according to common practice [4], [9]. Figure 7 shows the evaluation of the IC in a seating box while Figure 8 shows the computer-aided design evaluation of the visibility of the interfaces.…”