MOD signs up to driver coaching service that will help reduce emissions
Peta Hodge
16th December 2009
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) could significantly reduce its fuel consumption and CO2 emissions over the next three years, having a signed a contract with GreenRoad to use the company’s automated driver coaching service in 4,578 of the Ministry’s vehicles.
A spokesperson for GreenRoad said the MOD did not want to raise expectations at this stage about what the service is likely to deliver – either in terms of environmental benefits or from a road safety point of view – but organisations using the service typically reduce their fuel consumption by between seven and 11 per cent.
Last month GreenRoad signed up Britain’s largest bus operator FirstGroup as a customer and expects all 9,000 of its buses to be using the service by 2010.
GreenRoad claims that, by using its service, each FirstGroup bus will use around 500 litres less fuel each year, equating to 1.2 tonnes less CO2. FirstGroup aims to reduce bus CO2 emissions by 132,000 tonnes over the next three years.
The GreenRoad service uses complex algorithms to analyse data from an accelerometer (the same motion technology that is found in a Wii or an iPhone), monitoring how a car is being driven by detecting around 120 different manoeuvres.
The company says drivers are empowered to change their driving behaviour by a combination of automated feedback, in the form of a red-amber-green LED display on the dashboard, and online coaching tools.
Fleet managers can also access this information and see whether vehicles are being driven in a safe and environmentally-friendly way.
The signing of the contract with the MOD follows a 2008 deployment in which Ministry vehicles using GreenRoad’s automated driver coaching service achieved a 31 per cent reduction in the number of high-risk driving manoeuvres.
The GreenRoad spokesperson said some customers buy the service primarily for the fuel consumption savings, “which makes sense, because the service soon pays for itself”. Others, like the MOD, employ it mainly with driver safety in mind, but get the ancillary benefits of cost and CO2 savings.
She added that reducing fuel consumption by around 10 per cent “is huge” and that if all the vehicle manufacturers that are working to reduce fuel consumption “got a 10 per cent hit straightaway”, they would be “delighted”.
Driver behaviour has a major impact on fuel consumption – the US Department of Energy says aggressive driving can increase fuel consumption by as much as 33 per cent on the open roads and five per cent in towns.
Commenting on the signing of the MOD and FirstGroup contracts, Aidan Rowsome, general manager, GreenRoad EMEA, said: “Both First and now the MOD are trailblazers in the commercial and public sectors respectively, and demonstrate that GreenRoad’s service not only saves lives but also makes environmental and business sense.”