With the New Eco Assist

October 6, 2009

You want to increase your fuel efficiency, but you’re not sure how. Now, there’s a car that teaches you—as you’re driving! The new Insight hybrid from Honda has a built-in feature called Eco Assist™, designed to help you improve your fuel efficiency as you drive.

Eco Assist is a built-in tool that can help you optimize fuel efficiency for your given set of driving conditions. According to Honda, it’s an “interactive, driver-focused fuel-economy enhancement technology” and is comprised of two main components: an ECON™ button that modifies the way the car works, and a sophisticated feedback system. These components can work individually or in tandem to help boost your overall fuel economy.

Pressing the ECON button enhances the efficiency of multiple vehicle systems: throttle control, CVT operation, idle-stop duration, air conditioning, and cruise-control operation (in EX model only). This provides a simple, passive way to improve your fuel efficiency.

The second part of Eco Assist is active—it provides real-time feedback about how a driver is driving, which allows the driver to change their driving habits to achieve better fuel efficiency. One feedback function is called Ambient Meter, which is a color enhanced speedometer background. When you´re driving efficiently, the background color is green. When you’re driving in a more aggressive manner, it turns blue. If your driving style is somewhere in between, the color is too, turning blue-green.

Another feedback function is the Multi-Information Display (MID), which allows you to view fuel-economy figures for the past three trips, as well as instantaneous and average fuel-economy statistics. One component of the Multi-Information Display is the Eco Guide bar. As you’re driving, if the Eco Guide bar moves too far to the left, it means you are braking too hard; too far to the right means you are accelerating too fast. Keeping the Eco Guide bar in the middle means you’re driving in a fuel efficient manner—which can add up to big savings at the pump.

Your results are continuously tracked as fuel-economy ratings are shown per drive cycle and on a lifetime basis in the form of plant-leaf graphics that appear in the Multi-Information Display (MID). Up to five leaves can be ‘earned´ as you demonstrate a fuel-efficient driving style. A real-time score is shown in the Eco Guide MID screen.

Honda’s new Eco Assist can be a fun, educational, and beneficial tool for increasing fuel efficiency and improving driving habits. Over time, you’ll learn the tactics and techniques that will allow you to achieve better fuel efficiency, and for those little slip-ups, the Eco Assist display is always there to serve as a reminder of what fuel efficient driving is all about.