How Can Music Influence Your Driving?

This post is in collaboration with Kia. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Do you have a playlist that you like to play on car journeys? We have a few that are our go to’s alongside the radio and audiobooks.

The problem is we all have slightly different music tastes so we have to have a few on rotation or even have one with a mish mash of everyone’s favourite songs on them. 

Kia recently conducted some research into how real world driving in electric cars can be influenced by music playing in the cabin, overseen by Dr Duncan Williams who is a leading authority in acoustics, noise, psychoacoustics and sounds science. 

The testing has shown that listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 can make drivers four times more efficient whereas the song Blinding Lights by The Weeknd was actually found to deplete the car’s battery power quickest! It seems that classical pieces definitely seem to help sustain battery power over other types of genres. 

Adele’s song Hello was found to be in the middle of the two – the slower pace plus the building crescendos brought out an emotive driving style not seen elsewhere! More emotive songs definitely seem to have an impact on driving and battery power.

The tests were all done using the award-winning all-electric Kia EV6 and the drivers completed a fixed route whilst listening to a pre-set playlist through the high tech sound system in the car. The car has a battery range of up to 328 miles and features ultra fast charging tech.

But what can you find on our playlists? We don’t always all go in the car everyday – Steve uses it during the week for work and sometimes does the school run in the afternoons if he is back in time. The main time we get together is at the weekends or during the school holidays and we often go on drives around our local area or to see family.

Currently we have two playlists that get the most plays from us:

This is much more my type of music than it is Steve’s and the kids but there are quite a few different songs on here that they also enjoy. These songs are really high energy and inspire singing along to them. 

These songs often remind me of my teenage years, driving around with friends, singing our hearts out. Now I get to do the same with my fiance and children too!

Now as you can imagine, this playlist is much more for the kids’ benefit than it is ours – but who doesn’t love a Disney song? Especially the ones that came out when Steve and I were kids. There is nothing like an upbeat Disney playlist to make a drive go quicker no matter how far we are driving and whatever reason we are going there for. We love the upbeat Lion King songs when in the midst of our drive whereas the slower princess ones are perfect as the drive winds down to the end.

These are our favourite playlists to listen to together as a family but of course, we all have our own that we like to listen to too.

What playlists do you like to listen to when on a drive? Do you find that they impact the driving style?