Garmin Eco Route Makes for Greener Driving

Have you ever wondered whether you could track how efficient your driving style is? Well now you can! It was my birthday today and my beautiful wife bought me a Garmin 1350 GPS system, and I love it, partly because I always get lost here in Texas but also because it features Garmin Eco Route which calculates how “green” my driving is for each trip.

The idea behind the technology is that the Garmin GPS unit can track how fast you accelerate / decelerate and how fast you are driving, how much fuel you have used based on your vehicle MPG rating and then it can give you feedback on how efficient your driving style is…

Garmin Eco Route

The whole idea behind the Garmin Eco Route is to promote a greener driving style and actually give the driver constant feedback on how efficiently they are driving…

I Can Now Use Eco Route for Greener Driving

The Garmin Eco Route was really easy to setup, I just had to click on the Eco Route icon and then go into the Vehicle Profile page to add my vehicles miles per gallon ratings…

The Eco Route Setup Menu - Easy to Use

The Vehicle Profile page allows the user to input the average city and highway miles per gallon for your vehicle;

The Vehicle Settings Page

The first time through the Vehicle Settings Page I had to enter the Fuel Type for my vehicle then the City fuel economy and Highway fuel economy. I have a Ford F-150 and it isn’t a very fuel efficient vehicle but I can at least modify my driving style to boost the green factor!

Once I had setup my vehicle info and dialed in the cost of unleaded gas in our area I was ready to go. I drove to and from work with the Garmin Eco Route giving me constant feedback on how “green” my driving style was. A leaf appeared on the GPS display which turned green if I was driving efficiently and then amber and red if I wasn’t driving efficiently!

My First Garmin Eco Route Report!

The report gave me some very interesting facts about my daily commute. I was surprised to see that I actually spent close to 2 hours driving and that it cost me about $7 in gas! I had never actually calculated how much I spend each day on gas each day but it did shock me. My average fuel economy was only 17.2 which is pretty bad but still better than most trucks.

My carbon footprint from just one day of commuting was 58 lbs of CO2 which again shocked me. The huge carbon footprint generated by vehicles everyday is indeed a great reason to buy a Hybrid or completely electric vehicle!

My First Eco Route Stats

So how green was my driving? You can see above that I made three separate journeys throughout the day and my best score was an 81% green rating. The Garmin gave me advice that I could maximize my score by accelerating and decelerating smoothly and by maintaining a constant speed wherever possible.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be trying to modify my driving style to beat that 81% score! Watch this space to see if I can improve and be a greener driver.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdvolcan/ / CC BY 2.0

My Driving Is Going to be Much Greener Now

Do you have any eco driving tips? Leave us a comment with your favorite green driving style tips…