Sneaking Interaction Techniques into Electric Vehicles

Due to the release of several electric vehicles (EV) to the car market, the number of sales is expected to increase soon. Concerning in-vehicle information systems (IVIS) of EVs, different kinds of information need to be communicated to the driver. E.g. displayed numbers for current energy consumption or the energy left in the batteries are hereby critical in terms of a potential increase of range anxiety. In order to meet the special needs of EV drivers, manufacturers will have to rethink common designs known from regular combustion engine cars to create electric vehicle information systems (EVIS). We argue, that this fact will open up the opportunity to introduce novel interaction techniques into the EV, which have been successfully developed but have not yet found their way into the automobile. As an example, we will mention the in-car interaction via freehand gestures.