Eva: An Anxiety Soothing Companion for EV Owners

Electric vehicles are taking the world by storm. With environmental concerns, strict regulations and more competitionon the market, technology has started to evolve at a great speed.Yet there are still many fields and opportunities to be discovered.

This degree project concentrates on the most noticeable change with personal vehicles - charging a car. While early adopters and EV enthusiasts can overcome the change, there are still many sceptics worried about EVs being suitable for everyday lives. Especially in Estonia. The objective and research problem of this project was to understand what are the main concerns of these people and how we could help them overcome these obstacles.

The research for this degree project was done in 4 phases - desk research, a quantitative study, qualitative interviews and self observing. The learnings and problems emerged from the research gave good indication to where the issues lie. The problem statement evolved throughout the process and came to EV owners living in apartment buildings needing to find alternative means of charging, because they have no possibility to charge at home and are experiencing charge anxiety due to the uncertainty of charging.

Through the ideation phase and multiple iterations, the final solution proposes a cross platform electric vehicle assistant, which will take the load of planning charging stops off EV owners. The design proposal is described through interactions between the user and the assistant.

Keywords: EV, electric vehicles, EV charging, charge anxiety, artificial intelligence.