Alex Gilleran
My entry is a web app that uses the GoGet data to determine exactly how much fuel and carbon dioxide could be saved per pod if that pod was equipped with electric charging facilities and its cars replaced with electric equivalents. This was inspired by some comments made during the kick-off day, where one of the GoGet guys explained that Victoria had more electric car pods because the NSW government wanted $30,000 per pod. This seems like a real shame to me, because I would've thought that car-share schemes like GoGet are a great fit for plug-in electric cars. The main drawbacks for electric cars are that they need specialised power-points to charge rapidly, have a relatively short range and in between trips need to be left for a while to charge... a perfect fit for GoGet cars, which are generally used for shorter trips and always returned to the same location. I also think that they also suit a car sharing service as people are reluctant to adopt electric cars seeing how they're paying a lot of money for what is essentially an unknown quantity, but none of that inertia exists for booking a GoGet car to drive to the shops and back... if anything, people will be eager to book these cars just to see what they're like. At least that was what I assumed... fortunately I now had the data to prove it. What I set out to make was a simple web app to make the case to government and to GoGet themselves for rolling out electric pods, based on the amount of pollution and fuel that this would save. The methodology is something like: - A pod has a number of cars. - Most of these cars are small cars (e.g. a Yaris), where an electric car would be just as good (i.e. I didn't count vans or utes) - These cars have publically-available data on how much fuel and CO2/km they use (I had to manually import this from http://carfueldata.direct.gov.uk/) - Each of these cars has bookings, with a total KM value attached to each - Any booking for a small car could have been driven instead by a clean-fuel-charged electric equivalent as long as its KM value is less than the range of the electric car. - Hence, the KM of the booking multiplied by the CO2/km gives us how much carbon we could've saved by having an electric car drive that booking instead - this goes for fuel saved as well. - If you add up the saveable CO2 and fuel for each booking of each car in each pod, you end up with the amount of pollution and fuel that could be saved per pod, and by sorting you can identify the best pods to convert.
