Today, Google said that 40 more European nations will now have
access to Google Maps' eco-friendly routing options. Eco-friendly routes, which
were originally made available to users in the United States last year, promise
to display more fuel-efficient routes rather than the quickest ones. Users can
see a leaf label marking the environmentally beneficial route.
Users can tap on their profile picture on Google Maps, go to Settings >
Navigation Settings, and then scroll down to Route Options to change the
settings for environmentally friendly routes. Users can enable or disable
fuel-efficient routing by tapping the "Prefer fuel-efficient routes"
option.
The business is also introducing a new tool that will allow car
owners to select the type of engine in their vehicle in order to receive
tailored suggestions for the most fuel-efficient routes for that engine. Users
will soon be able to choose the type of engine for navigation—petrol or gas,
diesel, hybrid, or electric vehicle (EV)—by going to the options described
above.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the U.S.
Department of Energy and information from the European Environment Agency have
contributed to the development of this technology. The business claimed in a
blog post that they were able to create sophisticated machine learning models
trained on the most popular engine types in a specific region by combining this
data with Google Maps driving habits.
According to Google, it has been possible to prevent carbon
emissions equal to 100,000 cars thanks to the introduction of environmentally
friendly routes across the US and Canada.
By
adding additional capabilities to Google Maps, the company 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 released bike navigation tools in July that
included information about the volume of car traffic and the different sorts of
roads in the area.