U.S. tech giant Google has reportedly revealed its plans to expand its eco-friendly navigation options on Google Maps in over 40 new countries across Europe.
Eco-friendly routes, which were originally offered to users in the United States last year, seek to offer better fuel-efficient routes rather than the shortest ones. Users can see a leaf label marking the environmentally preferable route.
People can click on their profile photo on Google Maps, go to Settings > Navigation Settings, and thereafter scroll to the bottom to Route Options to change the settings for environmentally friendly routes. Users can enable or disable fuel-efficient routing by pressing the "Prefer fuel-efficient routes" option.
The organization is also introducing a new feature that will allow car owners to select the type of engine in their car to receive tailored suggestions for the most fuel-efficient routes for that engine. In the upcoming weeks, customers will be able to head to the above-mentioned settings and choose the engine type such as gas or petrol, electric or hybrid vehicle, for navigation.
The NREL or National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy and data received from the European Environment Agency have contributed to the development of this technology.
Google stated that the firm was able to create sophisticated machine learning systems based on the most common engine types in a specific region by combining this data with Google Maps driving style.
According to Google, it has been possible to prevent carbon emissions equal to 100,000 cars because of the introduction of environmentally friendly routes across the US and Canada.
By adding new functions to Google Maps, Google has tried to persuade users to use more environmentally friendly navigating methods throughout the years. Information on EV charging stations was originally added to the app by the company in 2018.
The company also released its bike navigation tools in July that included information about the frequency of car traffic and the different types of roads in the area.
Source credit: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/google-maps-is-expanding-its-eco-friendly-navigation-feature-to-40-more-countries/