Initially designed to enable vehicle maintenance and

Initially designed to enable vehicle maintenance and fault detection,
OBD ports, which now equip most of the vehicles on the road, enable
the development of new applications, such as connected insurance
(pay how you drive) , and provide users with detailed information on
how they drive, the level of pollution generated by the vehicle, and
even links with a maintenance service.
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These remote diagnosis
functions are also proposed by the car manufacturers in certain models,
via applications functioning thanks to their own operating system.
There are also other technologies, which do not use the OBD port,
that enable real time monitoring of vehicle pollution emission (e.g.
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The retrofitting of particle filters is relatively ineffective: see the article by Challenges
on this topic and the June 2014 publication by ADEME.
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Mobivia, for example, markets a compact device – dongle – that can be connected to
an OBD socket to provide detailed vehicle data via smartphone and to connect to a
maintenance service.
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W H AT R O L E F O R C A R S I N T O M O R R O W ’ S W O R L D ?
the GECO air app for smartphones, developed by IFPEN, which
informs users of the level of emissions of their journeys).
We can therefore imagine the development of relatively inexpensive
technologies (well below e 100 per car), to enable each driver to
know how much pollution is generated by his journeys, according
to actual use of the vehicle. This flow of information, available via
smartphone for drivers, could also provide input for a global database,
while guaranteeing, in compliance with privacy laws, anonymity of
the connected cars. This would have a number of advantages:
• providing public authorities with detailed information on our actual
journeys, to be used in urban planning and improve
regulations;
• enabling users to compare their behaviours with those of others:
do they pollute more, or less, and why? Such comparisons, which
lie at the heart of “soft” regulation systems based on peer com-
parison (nudge
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), could have an effective, non-coercive impact
on behaviour.
This is all the more interesting now that knowledge of the air quality
is better and is becoming intelligible to the general public. For
example, within a geographic area, applications like the one proposed
by PlumeLabs provide an air quality report, with a predictive
dimension.
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Nudge - Improving decisions about health, wealth and Happiness is a book by Richard
Thaler, economist at University of Chicago, and Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law School
professor. The book draws on research in psychology and behavioural economics to
defend techniques to enable private individuals to make the choices that are considered
to be more virtuous, notably using peer comparison and “soft” social constraints, while
limiting coercive approaches.