Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the mobile HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles. We thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. While some research has been done on energy management of mobile devices, less has been done on mobility devices like electric vehicles. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we developed. Our results demonstrate three dimensions related to energy availability to consider for design of energy dependent mobility devices and provide explanations on how these dimensions could be utilize in our design through energy visualizations. With this we contributed not only by demonstrating aspects of energy availability and mobility, but also through opening up for new interesting possibilities and inquires in our and possibly other domains.

Sales of Electric vehicles (EVs) are estimated by the industry to increase in the future, as they are an important step towards more energy efficient transportation and to lower CO2 emissions. A problem is that available battery technologies for EVs limit the driving range and might cause range anxiety, and as technology stands now, this problem will be present for many years to come. As a result, it is important to re-design the electric vehicle information system (EVIS) to include tools that could easily help users overcome range anxiety issues. Design of such technology can take advantage of the experience accumulated by drivers who have already coped with this problem for many years. In this paper, we describe a coping strategy observed among some more experienced EV drivers, describe why this strategy is powerful, and demonstrate a first attempt to utilize it in design. 

Electric cars may be an important alternative to combustion engine cars in the process towards a more sustainable transportation system. However, the short and varying driving range communicated by what has become known as the "guess-o-meter" on the dashboard of current electric car models is known to sometimes cause confusion for electric car drivers. In this paper, we analyze this issue and propose alternative solutions to the current way of presenting the remaining driving range to the driver. We do this by exploring a concept that we call differentiated driving range. The concept aims to reveal the relationship between factors related to driving and the estimated driving range. Starting from this concept we explore different ways of giving it a concrete form and eventually reach a fully testable interactive design. We believe that this is of interest to a wider audience and reflect on some issues with our current instantiation and directions for future work.

Electric cars are a promising alternative to combustion engine cars to lower emissions and fossil fuel dependencies. However, many are skeptical to this unfamiliar technology and the limited driving range of these vehicles. Therefore, people disregard this option without properly knowing if it is a good practical alternative. This is unfortunate, as electric cars according to studies should cover most people’s needs. In this paper, we will share our results from a real-world study where 8 participants used an app designed to simulate the battery of electric cars using a regular combustion engine car. In this way it is intended to let people assess their real needs in their real context. Our results show that this might be an effective tool to overcome psychological barriers associated with electric cars, as they do not only assess electric cars and infrastructure, but also their own needs and habits. We also suggest a shift from a kWh and bar perspective to a percentage-perspective as our users easily could work with percentage to figure out the driving range and plan ahead. Our study also elevated a number of uncertainties causing unnecessary worries among our participants.