mpg Tournament

This idea is aimed at yuppie junior-management/reps/tossers who tend to drive BMWs and are pathalogically competitive, mostly because their competitive spirit (or irksomeness) is what I'm attempting to harness. This would also be most effective for the gamer generation who are already strongly attuned to finding point-scoring rewarding.

It's rather difficult to encourage people to drive in a more economical manner, not least because it's usually very boring. Part of the problem is that the only direct reward for doing so, saving money on fuel, is deferred and easily forgotten behind the wheel. My proposal gives the driver an instantaneous reward for economical driving by means of them scoring points according to their mpg. The most obvious way to do this would be to add the second-by-second mpg (like you can get from the trip computer on many modern cars) to their score as this would give a half decent approximation of the total fuel consumption for a trip. That system does leave a question mark over how the score should change whilst the car is stationary with the engine idling, perhaps an arbitrary amount should be deducted from the score, determined by the amount of fuel the engine consumes at idle.

Of course, the most accurate way to score the system would be to derive an mpg for the entire trip (I think this is already available on some cars) but that would rob the driver of the instant gratification of watching their score tot up faster as they ease off the accelerator. At the end of a trip drivers can then compare scores with each other and gloat or whinge accordingly, or see who can score the most points on a particular route.