We've built an app to investigate greater transparency regarding stated EV range figures. This provides much-improved information in comparison to the data published by many car manufacturers, in official tests and onboard the vehicle itself via a dashboard range estimate (AKA the guess-o-meter). We are investigating how these range figures deteriorate over the lifetime of the vehicle; providing owners, buyers and sellers of EVs with essential transparency on the health of a particular vehicle. We believe that higher fidelity range estimations are crucial to accelerating wider EV adoption and we're looking for your help. We're hoping to harness the impressive power of the pioneering EV community to validate our app-based range estimation software. As well as providing transparency on range estimates we're able to use these insights to make comparisons against other new and used vehicles to identify issues like battery degradation and other losses in EV performance. If you'd like to get involved and use our app to validate the range of your EV, please click the link below: Sign up PS - we are in the process of filing our patent and therefore you will be asked to sign an NDA at the first step in the process Best, ClearWatt Team
This is what I use today: Can you be more specific about what your new tool will bring to the party? Bob Wilson
Bob Wilson's got range calculations pretty well figured out, but maybe your app does something different than his quadratic equations predict. Would it expose too many details about your patent to explain what it means to "validate the range" of an EV? For example, will your app access current weather information for my location and calculate range for the current direction I'm driving? Or will it take current weather information and route data I supply and calculate when I'll have to stop and charge? Or will it use crowdsourced data to tell me how many miles I can drive my EV in perfect conditions, assuming I've been kind to my battery?
These graphs are super interesting and we'd love to know more about the app that generated them. Are you able to share any more information? Upon first inspection and without knowing details of the technology used by the app that you've shown us, the principal difference between our software and what we can see here is that our technology works without establishing any connection to the vehicle. No API connectivity and definitely no OBD tinkering. Secondly, it looks like this app requires a large number of tests to be completed resulting in a learning of vehicle behaviour over time. Our technology instead provides a snapshot of the vehicle's current performance and compares this against benchmark data. Look forward to being able to tell you guys more in the future
You're not far off the mark with a lot of these proposals! We can't say much more than this for now unfortunately.
I've been using "TezLab" for over two years. That is how it tracked my battery health. Best of all, it captures all charging sessions and drives from the car. So I have a functional log. Bob Wilson
Hi Bob, TezLab looks really useful for Tesla owners but we’ve developed an app that works for all makes and models, not just Teslas! What features do you appreciate the most in TezLab?
The logging which is good news/bad news: Good news - the example is a charging record into the battery which does not include the overhead like heater or A/C. That single entry from the log shows my 100% charge at home on my L2 EVSE starting with 4 mi, ~1 kWh. So we're looking at 46.8 kWh battery capacity as part of the battery balancing. Bad news - no way to transfer the records electronically in a CSV format for personal spreadsheet loading. For battery balancing, I used the approach of leaving the car at a low state of charge for a couple of hours. Then charge to 100% and let it sit there for a couple of hours. So far, the estimated maximum range remains in the 215 mi that I originally had. I can't say that any cells were 'balanced' but I followed a 'YouTube' claimed protocol. Bob Wilson
Cameron, I'm belatedly catching up on this thread, but I don't think this has been asked yet: You apparently want us to help you develop a commercial product. How much compensation are you offering?
I've participated in development of several Apps by being an unpaid beta tester. I sent back dumps and problem reports ... even in a few cases donating a small fee to support the developers. Apple supports this with their "TestFlight" App that supports developer-to-testers communications including beta version transfers. I wasn't paid and had no interested other than seeing the App working enough I could use it. No, I'm not volunteering to support this team ... not enough information to understand the 'value added engineering.' My ears are open. Bob Wilson
Hi Bruce, as it stands we're not offering any additional compensation for testing our mobile app. By joining our early testers programme, users are presented with a complete breakdown of their EV's battery health completely free of charge.
Hi Bob, thanks for the useful feedback. Hopefully I can provide a little more colour on the value added engineering. We're looking for feedback in the following areas of our product: 1. UI/UX - Is our app easy to use? Is there anything that's creating friction? 2. Did you find any bugs? 3. Were the results you received at the end of the process in-line with your driving experience and vehicle knowledge? 4. What additional features would you like to see?
