Hypermiling: The ECO Pedal

This article from treehugger.com highlights some new technology that could improve your gas mileage significantly. As I noted in this post, instant feedback is a great way to quickly improve your fuel economy. The ECO Pedal seems to be a novel way to give the driver that instant feedback. From the Nissan website:

The ECO Pedal system is fed data on the rate of fuel consumption and transmission efficiency during acceleration and cruising, and then calculates the optimum acceleration rate. When the driver exerts excess pressure on the accelerator, the system counteracts with the pedal push-back control mechanism.

Not only does the computer system calculate optimum acceleration, but it gives both visual and tactile feedback. The fuel savings are estimated at 5-10%. I think that this might even be an understatement as I have shown fuel economy improvements of around 30% by hypermiling, using the ScanGaugeII. Adding the fact that it can be enabled and disabled, I think this feature would be very desirable on any car.