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Comment by YokoZar | Hacker News Reader

If the nest is what makes it fun and simple enough to change the habits, it's entirely reasonable to say the nest caused them. Maybe most of the value of the nest comes from behavior modification rather than more precise temperature control. But even so, that's still value.

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Exactly. It's like how the LCD with the real-time and historical fuel economy info in the Prius has been teaching people to drive more efficiently via the instant feedback you might not get in most other vehicles.

It's easy to say you could achieve the same thing without it, but facts show most people don't.

Many, many vehicles have real-time fuel-usage meters. Most people completely ignore them. The people who care about fuel-usage -- the sort of person who buys a Prius -- of course pay attention to it because it justifies the reason to buy the car.

Yet I suspect that very few of the people who bought the Nest actually care about energy usage, or reducing it. It is a lifestyle product and is a talking point, and while there are some who really desire it for that, many more set it to a static temperature and forget it. I hugely doubt that the total set of Nest users have seen any measurable decline in usage.

Isn't there a huge difference between the meter that the Prius has and the typical "real time" fuel meter. In particular, it is difficult to see how instant readings contribute to long term averages.

Not as many vehicles had those when the Prius first came out, and even now few make MPG as front-and-center with graphs and such. Implementation matters.

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