AA Launches New Free Eco Driving App

Eco Driving App

Eco driving = Fun? The two are not normally put together but that could all change with the launch of the AA’s new Eco Driving App. This fun, challenge based, app could help to improve your driving techniques and see you save an average of between 10 and 20 percent on fuel bills.

Rising fuel costs are making many motorists look at their driving habits. According to a recent AA/Populus poll**, 76 per cent of motorists are both cutting down on the number of car journeys and cutting back on other expenditure such as eating out or the weekly shop due to rising fuel costs. The AA Eco Driving App will help you monitor your driving style to reduce fuel consumption and all with an element of fun thrown in that your family and friends can get involved with.

The driver starts by selecting the vehicle, or mode of transport, that best matches their own ranging from van, super mini, saloon, bicycle to even a pair of trainers if walking or running each of which is represented by a quirky cartoon style image. The app is activated at the beginning of the journey and will monitor your driving and display to passengers how economically you are driving.  Even if the phone is used during the journey the monitoring will continue. At the end of the journey an Eco Rating will be awarded for the journey depending on how economically you have driven. This score is saved and can be used to compare subsequent journeys to see how well you are improving over time.

To encourage you to continually improve your driving techniques, it is not just the Eco rating you will receive.  Along the way it is possible to win awards for a variety of skills or landmarks passed. The awards include the Continuum Award for completing a journey of at least 10 miles without stopping, the Novice Award for using the app on five journeys up to the Hero Award for using the app on 1,000 journeys, county awards for each county visited and awards for passing key landmarks such as the Mersey Tunnel, Clifton Suspension Bridge or even the AA’s own Head Office in Basingstoke.

For the lazy motorist there is even a “Shanks’s Pony” award, for journeys using a car when you could have walked.

To show your friends and family how well you are doing you can share the results through a link to Facebook where you can also challenge others to see if they can do better.

AA President, Edmund King said, “With diesel prices just 1p below the record we are encouraging drivers to have fun and save money.  With this new app users will be able to learn new techniques to help improve their eco driving skills.’

The AA Eco Driving App will prove, at last, that eco driving can be a fun way to reduce fuel costs and introduce safer driving techniques.

The new AA Eco Driving App is available for free from iTunes and the Android store.