Ashwoods puts fuel saving the van driver’s seat 25 April 2012

Hybrid and electric commercial vehicle retrofit specialist Ashwoods chose the CV Show to launch a low-cost device aimed at cutting fuel consumption by providing driver performance information right on the dashboard.

The company, which specialises in converting Ford Transit vans for environmentally friendly propulsion – mostly for major brands wanting to wave the green flag – sees its Lightfoot bolt-on as a logical extension.

Lightfoot is a device integrated into the vehicle dashboard that provides simple green, amber and red lights – real time, but also averaged – as prompts to drivers, according to their driving behaviour.

The unit takes engine data from vehicle ECUs via the OBD socket, and computes driver actions compared with optimal behaviour, taking into account vehicle load, road incline, revs etc.

Ashwoods marketing head Victoria Davison says that drivers intuitively alter their driving style to comply with the traffic light prompts in front of them – moving their vehicles into the most efficient zone for the engine.

She claims that trials to date show fuel efficiency improvements of up to 18%. She also says that maintenance and accident rates improve.

All that is reinforced by the fact that fleet managers get periodic reports from each vehicle device, via Ashwoods' data centre, showing the good and the bad drivers – and the detail behind their misdemeanours.

Aimed initially at Ford Transit fleets, the device is currently being generalised and will, says Davison, be available for a very wide range of other vehicles "within a couple of weeks".

Author
Brian Tnham

Related Companies
Ashwoods Electric Motors Ltd

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