Google announced today that it would make its eco-friendly navigation choices on Google Maps available in 40 additional European nations. Earlier this year, eco-friendly route options became available to customers in the United States.
These routes offer more fuel-efficient alternatives to the fastest routes. The user-friendly path is labeled as “leaf” to indicate its eco-friendliness.
You can change your Google Maps settings to prioritize environmentally friendly routes by tapping your profile picture, selecting Settings > Navigation Settings, and selecting Route Options. Select the “Prefer fuel-efficient routes” menu item to activate or deactivate fuel-efficient routing.
Furthermore, the firm is introducing a new function that will allow drivers to choose the engine type in their car and receive recommendations for the most fuel-efficient routes explicitly tailored to that vehicle.
Users will soon be able to go to the settings mentioned above and choose between gasoline, diesel, hybrid, and electric vehicle (EV) powertrains when using navigation.
“This technology has been made possible by research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the U.S. Department of Energy and information from the European Environment Agency.
According to a corporate blog post, “By combining this data with Google Maps’ driving tendencies, we were able to train sophisticated machine learning models on the most prevalent engine types in a given location.”
According to Google, it has been able to prevent carbon dioxide emissions from 100,000 cars by implementing eco-friendly routes throughout the United States and Canada.
Google has introduced additional features in Google Maps to get users to choose more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. In 2018, the company first attempted to add EV charging station data to the app.
In July, this startup released bike navigation capabilities, including information on road kinds and traffic conditions.