Improving driving efficiency for hybrid electric vehicle with suitable interface

In driver-vehicle systems, the Human-Machine Interface (HMI) plays an important role to assist the drivers in understanding the status of the vehicle and also serves as an input device. The HMI is an essential part in different levels of autonomous driving. As long as the interaction between the driver and vehicle remains, the outputs from the assistance system should be displayed to the driver. Studying the state of the art of the displays in vehicles, it can be stated that most of the displays show the current state of the vehicle well and detailed. To drive efficiently or to make a right decision in time, the human driver has to be assisted more specifically. Increasing driving efficiency, namely decreasing fuel consumption is one of the issues in modern automotive technology. Based on the proposed concept, actions relevant to the predefined or given goals can be displayed based on Augmented Reality (AR) in a suitable manner. In such way, the driver-vehicle-loop is closed by the interface. In this contribution, three proposed interfaces sharing the same optimal strategy behind are proposed to increase the fuel efficiency. A driving simulator is used to test the proposed interfaces. It is connected to a HiL (Hardware in Loop) test rig, which simulates the powertrain of a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). Experiments were done to validate these three interfaces. Results show that the fuel efficiency is increased by using the proposed interfaces. Furthermore, results show also that more economic driving requires more cognitive workload.