Drivers’ memo #13: Home charging set-ups

Flip The Fleet Test Driver Memo #13

Kia ora koutou

A third of the way!  We currently have 312 people enrolled to provide data each month, but are shooting for over 1000.  We can now make reliable broad brush statements about EVs’ and PHEVs’ performance, but need more sign-ups to comment on regional differences, and to compare efficiency, repair & maintenance costs, Return on Investment etc. for the various vehicle models.  We have instigated a ‘Lite’, ‘Medium’ and ‘Heavy tech’ options for data entry to cater for those not wanting to report much more than their monthly odometer reading through to those who want to dive deep into the car’s battery and performance stats. Please shoulder tap other’s in your EV community and encourage them to sign-up.

Continuous improvements: We are working as fast as we can to improve the look and accuracy of the reports on your dashboards.  Last month we:

• Provided background information on each measure – just click the ‘(i)’ button to the right of each reports title. An explanation of what has been calculated and hints on how to customise the reports will pop up to help interpret your data.
• Arranged all the financial performance reports on a separate page from your travel and battery statistics. Make sure you flip between the dashboards by clicking the chevrons (>> or <<) at the top of the Dashboard, or Next/Previous buttons at the bottom. Those of you using a Tablet can also swipe sideways to navigate between the pages.
• Added a new ‘Repairs and maintenance savings’ report. It is calculated using AA’s estimates of what it costs to run a conventional vehicle over the first five years of its life.  Your monthly data on maintenance and repair costs will soon be analysed to measure these savings directly, but we don’t quite have enough data for this (somewhat erratic) expenditure yet.  In the meantime treat this new report as an approximation.
• Modified the fuel use and $$ saved calculations to include an adjustment for your % urban (<50 kph) travel. Had you been driving an ICV in town, you would have needed a lot more petrol or diesel per km – our early equations simply took an average of the urban vs. ex-urban consumption estimates.
• Provided our first national extrapolation of fuel saved and CO2e emissions saved is given in the ‘NZ Data’ dashboard (the last one before your ‘Data Dump’ sheet). We reckon that the entire NZ EV fleet saved around 860,000 kg of CO2e in tail-pipe emissions last month.  But there is a long way to go – collectively this is only about the same emissions generated by 420 people flying from Auckland to London one way – we want them to come back home again too!).

August’s 1-click survey:  Ninety-two percent of you find home charging your EV to be more convenient than going to a petrol station to fill an ICV with petrol.  Your avalanche of comments (reported at https://flipthefleet.org/2017/convenience-home-charging-compared-filling-petrol-1-click-survey-10/) really helped give a personal dimension to the press release at https://flipthefleet.org/2017/media-release-electric-vehicle-owners-prefer-charging-home-filling-petrol-station/. Thanks!

Home charging set-ups:  Your registration data is mainly used to calculate travel and performance indicators for your dashboard, but it also gives good background material to help carry the press releases along.  This month we featured home charging behaviour i.e.

• Of 312 vehicles registered in Flip the Fleet, 35% charge between 11 pm and 7am when the price of electricity is much lower.
• 40% charge their cars using standard (8 amp) household plugs.
• 43% have installed higher capacity (15 & 16 amp) plugs, mostly ‘Commando’ caravan plugs
• The remaining 17% have opted for the more convenient and usually faster option of building in a wall-mounted specialised charging equipment in their garage.
• Many owners carry both an 8 amp and 16 amp charging lead in their boot as extra insurance, or to top-up their battery when visiting far away friends.

 

Cheers

Henrik, Dima and Jefferson