September 17, 2025 - Subtle Nudges Can Change Behavior and Reduce Emissions

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for September 16, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  

This week, the Center for Automotive Research is holding its 60th Annual Management Briefing Seminars in Detroit. The keynote speaker yesterday was Toyota's Chief Scientist, Dr. Gill Pratt. During his talk, Dr. Pratt reiterated Toyota's multi-pathway approach to carbon emissions reductions that includes deploying a range of propulsion technologies, including hybrid, plug-in hybrid, battery electric, and hydrogen fuel cells. 

A key element of achieving real-world emissions reductions from any of these technologies is ensuring that they actually get used. For example, if a manufacturer builds EVs but they don't actually get purchased by consumers, it's actually a negative for the environment because manufacturing the batteries causes more emissions, and they save nothing if they are sitting on a dealer lot. 

Plug-in hybrid vehicles are another potential problem. Unlike a battery EV, a PHEV can be driven without ever plugging it in. This has the double penalty of the emissions associated with battery production, plus hauling around several hundred pounds of battery, which leads to greater fuel consumption than a standard hybrid. 

The Toyota Research Institute that Dr. Pratt leads has done studies on how nudging drivers through notifications from apps, either in the vehicle or on a smartphone, can help to reduce emissions and improve customer satisfaction. TRI ran tests to prompt drivers of PHEVs to plug in their vehicles so that they could actually drive on electricity more of the time. The group that received charging prompts increased charging by 10%. As a result of getting more electric driving miles, the satisfaction of those owners with their cars increased by 16% to 100%. 

A separate study done in Japan prompted drivers of plug-in hybrid and battery vehicles to plug in their vehicles during the day when more renewable solar energy is available, rather than overnight. The result was 59% more daytime charging than in the control group. 

Subtle nudges can make a difference in behavior.

Thanks for listening.