Design Narrative

How sustainable is an electric car? The common conception of driving an electric car is that people think to be using an eco-friendly vehicle, however, this is not entirely true after our research. The main problem with this misconception is due to a lack of information given, the battery and energy source to run the car’s production are very polluting. A Swedish study proved that the manufacturing of an entirely electric car’s battery is as polluting as driving a fueled car for about 8 years. Additionally to the production pollution, if the car is charged with non-renewable energy, the production of it produces CO2 emissions into the air. The interfaces we designed are to make people conscious about energy production and the car production’s pollution. Our product consists of 3 parts: the dashboard, an interface for the charging station and the car. The dashboard has a design showing how much the car has been driven in correlation to the 8 years of production pollution. Secondly, we also designed an interface for the charging station. These interfaces shows a graph with the different energy sources and a precise percentage of the energy that are available at the station. This allows the users to know the provenience and the sustainability of the energy and having the choice of making a conscious decision. Finally, the car interface is an expansion of the charging station interface and the dashboard showing the two, recording each history and having an explanation for each part.