Flip the Fleet EVolution

The Flip the Fleet project has been publicly launched to accelerate the electric vehicle (EV) revolution throughout New Zealand.

It’s a kind of ‘Fitbit for EVs’ – a way of measuring how well your car is performing, the amount of energy going in and far and fast you travel, and how well your battery is lasting.
Flip the Fleet is a tool for learning how to get more out of your EV. You can benchmark your driving against that of other EV owners with the same model, or who live in your region, or travel the same amount as you in town.

Flip the Fleet is meant to be fun, but there is a serious side. Scientifically reliable information will be gathered about how EVs go in New Zealand, and how Kiwis have built them into their daily lives.

Participants can use the reports to show others the evidence and to counter both exaggerations of the benefits and misinformation about the disadvantages of EVs.

It’s a “by EV owners for future EV owners” effort.

EVs spin the wheels of their owners for many different reasons.
Some love the performance and the quiet ride. Others appreciate how much money they save. More are motivated mainly by reducing the environmental impacts of vehicles, especially to combat climate change.
Flip the Fleet calculates monthly and lifetime performance measures in all these domains. There is also a whole fleet monitoring capacity in the software so businesses can track their financial benefits and tune their investment decisions, all while showing their shareholders and customers that they are doing their bit for the planet (and for their bottom lines).

The project began from off the cuff comments on the EV Owners’ Facebook page last year.
Henrik Moller, an ecologist from Otago University’s Centre for Sustainability, suggested to the EV Owners’ group that data should be pooled to show other New Zealanders how good EVs are for people, the purse and the planet.
IT geek Dima Ivanov offered the services of PowerStats, his business benchmarking software, to collect, analyse and report the data to any EV owner that joined up.

“Somehow we needed to demonstrate proof of product and that EV owners would actually join up and share their data,” he says. “But we had no funding to perfect the software to allow us to customise the performance measures for each owner’s car.”

Otago Museum provided a life line by funding software development from its Participatory Science Platform, a programme of the government’s Curious Minds portfolio.

“Our group of test drivers has grown steadily, and lots of EV owners have back loaded the data they had recorded in notebooks from the time they first bought their car. The project already has 140 vehicles registered to add their monthly data. We want to get to a 1000 EVs eventually – the more data that streams in, the better the science, and the louder our collective voice can be to encourage investment in more infrastructure and EV-friendly policies for us all to get the best out the EV revolution.”