If you've made the decision to purchase a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), you're probably interested in just how efficient it can be and how your driving habits will influence the car's overall range. To make it easier to keep track of this information, Volvo has introduced additional features and insights for its Volvo on Call smartphone app, which applies to all PHEVs in Volvo on Call markets.

Cheekily referred to as a "step counter for electrified cars", the ultimate goal is to encourage customers to drive in electric-only mode as often as possible. In the bigger scheme of things, Volvo is chasing a greener future with an aim to have all-electric vehicles make up half of its total sales by 2025.

PHEVs still have a short electric-only range in general, so maximizing this capability makes sense. In the Volvo XC90 Hybrid, for instance, it can travel 18 miles in total on battery power alone. That won't be enough for every driver to get to and from the office, but at the same time, not every driver may be making use of electric-only mode as often as they can.

The app can display information such as electricity/fuel consumption, how much distance has been covered in fully electric mode, and other metrics. Additional features will be introduced later in the year, such as how driving style impacts someone's CO2 footprint.

Bjorn Annwall is the head of EMEA at Volvo Cars and said: "I believe that by giving people better insight into their driving patterns, it will help them to drive in a more sustainable way."

The new features are offered for all Volvo PHEVs sold after 2015 and built on the Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) and Compact Modular Architecture (CMA) platforms. The SPA platform underpins Volvos like the S90 and XC60, while the latter was jointly developed by Volvo and Geely - it underpins the smaller XC40.