Lexus: The hybrid debate blog

If you’re trying to adapt your driving habits to environmental concerns, one of biggest challenges is getting hold of reliable, unbiased and easy-to-grasp information. Satellite navigation systems enable us to be "greener" indirectly, by calculating optimally fuel-efficient routes. But they could, in conjunction with other existing technologies, supply us with much richer information and, as a result, do much more to improve our behaviour.

Whether hybrid cars proliferate as a result of climate change concerns, fuel tax or any other combination of factors, they will certainly play a major role - arguably, the most overt role of any single consumerist activity - in raising public awareness of "sustainable living". Today, they promote the sustainable agenda passively. Tomorrow, they will do so actively, and in a way that may give competitive advantage to their manufacturers.

Even now, cars navigate through what has been called "hybrid space". This isn’t a reference to engines but to the marriage of digital information with the physical environment. Hybrid space is all around us. It consists of all the cyberspatial, radio and infrared data streams that, sometimes, we log into fleetingly with our mobile phones and GPS systems.

A dashboard computer designed to tap into hybrid space would provide rich information about the car’s surroundings at all times. It would reference the Internet wirelessly in order to contextualise the journey. And it would give the driver many more options to lessen their impact on the environment. For example, it might calculate the relative power consumption of a long, flat drive versus a short, hilly one. Or it might calculate the difference in total environmental costs between driving to France via a ferry or via the Channel Tunnel.

Furthermore, the car has been described as a "complex speeding optical machine" - a means to see the world from a radically different perspective. It is this pedagogic function that, as well as being turned inwards to alter the behaviour of the driver, can be turned outwards to enhance ecological understanding. We might not be able to influence the terrain outside the car directly, but we can improve our understanding of what is environmentally good and environmentally bad (or at the very least environmentally un-optimised) in our surroundings.

Imagine, for example, that we are happily driving along, having chosen the greenest route to our destination, and our car senses another on the road that has poorer fuel efficiency and a dirtier engine. The computer could make us aware of that car’s likely hourly output of pollution, and the total cost to the environment over its lifetime.

Alternatively, if we drove past a heavy industrial installation, the computer could tell us who ran it, how much energy it wasted and how its design might be improved. Today’s power stations, for example, often only convert 40% of the energy they generate into usable electricity, while "combined heat and power" stations are much more efficient. A car that alerted passers-by to the shortfalls of a particular company might help create pressure for further advances in clean technology.

Taking this idea a little further, a car could have its own website, where its journeys would be published automatically. Here, the driver could recommend the most environmentally friendly routes from one destination to another and sites of special interest for those interested in protecting the environment and promoting sustainable living. The on-board computer could also be used to publish "geo-tags" - invisible, virtual messages that would be triggered on other mobile phones or computers when they passed certain landmarks or entered certain locations.

To conclude, the car might become an agent of social change, linking more information explicitly to its geographical location and perhaps even causing embarrassment to polluting companies or exposing statistical lies. Most importantly, it could teach us to see with new eyes what’s cleaner than what. It could be a powerful educator in the fight against environmental degradation.