Designing Trust in Electric Vehicles: Beyond Range and Battery Percentage

Designing trust in electric vehicles starts with understanding the driver’s day — not just the battery percentage on the dash.

Many EV owners already use electric cars as their daily drivers, and Indonesia’s EV sales has more than doubled in a single year. What still trips them up shows on the unavoidable and unpredictable days: a shrinking battery in heavy traffic caused by rain, a charging app that names a station but not whether it will work when they arrive, and a home charger that not everyone has. This case study traces where that hesitation comes from and what it costs — the moment a driver reaches for the petrol car instead, because it feels more predictable.

Drawing on Jakarta traffic and charging data, our case study proposes Arrival Confidence: a way of showing whether every planned trip that day is still on time and on battery, and what to do the moment it isn’t. The focus is on practical shifts: one clear recommendation instead of another dashboard, a morning briefing that plans the whole day against a driver’s calendar, and local calibration that keeps learning from Jakarta’s own traffic and rain. The aim is to give mobility and product teams a grounded starting point to design EV experiences around trust, not just range.

Alif Farhan