The Finnish Fuel Company Will Ruin Your Music If You Drive Too Fast

There are many good reasons not to drive too fast. If you get caught, you are likely to face a fine or even jail. Speed ​​is a known factor in road traffic deaths. And if your car runs on petrol, it will burn more if you have the leading foot. It costs more money. But most importantly: it produces more exhaust emissions, especially CO2, which contributes to climate change.

But if all these reasons aren’t enough incentive to slow down, Finnish energy company St1 has another suggestion: it will increase the tempo of your music when you exceed the speed limits, effectively ruining your listening experience as a reminder. foot off the gas pedal.

To be clear, this is a publicity stunt. The St1 doesn’t have the ability to truly customize the music in the car if you use Spotify, Apple Music, or satellite/terrestrial radios. Instead, the company created its own music streaming service called Sound Driving. And it’s not even a full-fledged music streaming service: it’s literally a single playlist powered by Epidemic Sound that you access via the website.

“The initiative was born from the concept of nudge, a tool that can be used to change people’s behavior in a variety of creative ways,” said behavioral scientist and psychologist Bjorn Hedensjo in an emailed press release. “It’s like the horn you hear when you’re not wearing your seatbelt, a clear and important reminder that it’s time to ease up on the gas pedal.”

Technically, pushing, a term popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book, push, are a form of choice architecture in which the desired choice you want someone to make is presented as the most convenient or desirable option. This should not be a form of punishment for unwanted behavior.

In order for a playlist to track your speed, it needs access to your phone’s location via GPS, which you’ll need to provide when you first visit the site. As soon as you press the play button, exceeding known speed limits will increase the tempo of the music, turning everyone from Beyoncé to James Brown into chipmunks. Here is an example video showing a driver who is visibly upset that his music has been spoofed, but also seems to be momentarily confused as to why this is happening.

A spokesperson for St1 says the company hopes to go beyond a single Sound Driving playlist: “We’ll be approaching the biggest music services with this idea, so hopefully we’ll have a bigger collaboration in the future.”

Whether you like the idea of ​​changing your music to remind you to slow down or not, there is a real benefit to the climate in accepting slower speeds. According to St1, the Swedish Transport Agency estimates that speeding violations increase Sweden’s carbon dioxide emissions by 300,000 tons per year.

If the same is true for drivers in the US, and we extrapolate based on population alone (the US population is 31 times that of Sweden), then speed-related CO2 emissions could be as high as 9.3 million tons per year.