As drivers we have grown comfortable at getting hundreds of miles out of our petrol and diesel cars, but in the new and ever evolving world of electric vehicles we are in slightly uncharted territory with how far we can travel and how often the battery will need to be recharged. This is known as ‘range anxiety’ and has become quite a common symptom for someone looking at purchasing an electric car.
The brief from Tesla was then simply to find a way to help alleviate range anxiety – the worry that you might run out of charge in an electric car and have no way of recharging it when on a journey.
I was the lead designer and developer on this project whilst working for Edelman UK.
Consistent UI design that dovetailed with the Tesla brand
I designed the app to fit in with the core Tesla brand. Confident, elegant, minimalist typography, dark colours with small bright red accents to emphasise the high quality brand and their values. High quality photography was used throughout, placing the vehicles front and centre so this app would sit well alongside the glossy brochure handed out to dealerships.
When the app was suggested to consumers from the dealership, they would be given a Tesla branded Flic button to place on the dashboard of their car, allowing the user to start and stop journeys without the use of their phone whilst driving.
Easy access to your journey data
Allowing the consumer easy access to the data they had gathered through using the Charge Ahead app was a main deliverable of the brief. My concept for this was to provide the data in a news feed style so the latest journey made was the first visible, and merely scrolling back through the journey feed would show you a snapshot where the journey started to where it ended, the amount of battery used and how many miles you would have remaining on that remaining battery charge.
The option was included to delve deeper into any particular journey, allowing the user to study the route more closely and find where the closest charge points were on that journey - perfect for analysing if your daily commute was a possibility in an electric car. After enough journey data had been collected the app would recommend on your usage behaviour what level of battery would be suitable for your current needs - helping make the decision to buy a little easier.
Improved sales
The use of the app contributed to an increase in sales from Tesla dealerships. Customers highlighted the app as being a consistent source of truth, even over a shorter period of use, showing that not only was their daily commute possible in a Tesla, but even longer journeys were possible due to the app displaying the amount of Tesla branded superchargers and generic electric charging stations on their journeys and vicinity of location, putting their minds at ease and backing up dealership claims that the electric car really is the future.
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