FAQ
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Electric Vehicle Suitability Assessment FAQ
FAQ
0 mins to read
Browse frequently asked questions about the Electric Vehicle Suitability Assessment Add-In in Geotab Marketplace, including how the assessment works, what questions it can help answer, how it performs in range and cost analyses, and what types of vehicles the assessment supports.
A Geotab Marketplace Add-In
September 2023
The Electric Vehicle Suitability Assessment (EVSA) is a MyGeotab Marketplace Add-In intended to help fleet managers go electric by identifying fleet vehicles that are good candidates for EV.
The EVSA analyses fleet vehicle driving data and recommends an EV replacement when three conditions are met:
The EVSA is designed to help fleet managers answer the following questions:
The EVSA leverages two data sources to make a recommendation:
Telematics data is used to get an accurate view of each vehicle's daily driving distance, fuel consumption, dwell locations and stopping durations. Each vehicle's daily driving distance is calculated and compared to the real-world battery consumption of selected EVs. When the vehicle stops in a designated charging location (workplace or driver's home), then the EVSA simulates a charging session in that location. If an EV satisfies the daily range requirements while not exceeding the on-route charging threshold, then the EV goes through a lifetime cost analysis.
To determine whether an EV is cost effective, the lifetime cost of the candidate EV is compared to the lifetime cost of an equivalent brand-new non-EV. If the EV's lifetime cost is lower than that of the non-EV, then that EV is recommended as a replacement for the fleet vehicle.
For an EV to be recommended as a replacement to an existing fleet vehicle, the EV must be able to meet daily driving distance requirements without needing to charge on-route before going back to a charging-capable location.
For this analysis, the EVSA compares the vehicle’s trip distances to the projected EV range on a monthly basis, taking the local monthly temperature into consideration. If the number of required on-route charging events is within the allowed limit, then the EV is considered to be range-capable.
If the vehicle being evaluated reports trip data for less than 12 calendar months, then the EVSA will replay trips from other months to cover the entire year. The months that have trip data filled from trips occurring in other months are labelled as Assumed data on the range capability charts.
The EVSA calculates the lifetime cost of replacing a vehicle with an EV and compares it with replacing it with a non-EV. The following cost components are usually considered:
If the EV lifetime cost is higher than the non-EV equivalent, then the EV is not recommended as a replacement.
The EV Suitability Assessment can perform a charging viability analysis of the fleet vehicles by checking whether the selected vehicles stop long enough in locations where charging infrastructure is (or will be) available in order to fulfil their charging needs. Once the charging locations are defined, the analysis evaluates every stop to determine whether it is in a charging zone. The analysis then simulates the amount of energy that will go into the battery (based on 7.6-kW charging power) and compares it to the amount of energy that the vehicle will need for the next set of trips.
The EVSA supports two analysis scenarios:
To perform a charging viability analysis, the user is asked to select the workplace location zones where they plan to install a charging infrastructure. The user does not need to create or select zones for drivers' homes as these locations will be automatically detected. The user may also opt to skip the charging viability analysis while running an assessment.
What happens if I skip the charging viability analysis?
When the user chooses to skip the charging viability analysis, the EV Suitability Assessment will not ask the user to select zones where charging infrastructure is planned and will assume that the vehicle starts the day with a full battery charge at the beginning of every day.
The EV Suitability Assessment add-in supports the following vehicle types:
The EV Suitability Assessment is available officially in the following countries:
Country support covers the following:
If you reside in an unsupported country, the EVSA will still work with the following caveats:
We recommend that each vehicle selected for the EVSA has at least four weeks of driving data to get meaningful results. Fleets with seasonal drive cycles are advised to include more driving data to account for seasonality.
The EVSA Add-In requires a service account to communicate with MyGeotab. The service account retrieves trip data—required by the Add-In—to run the suitability analysis. The user installing the Add-In must have the authorisation to create user accounts; otherwise, the installation fails. The Service Account has access to the same vehicles and groups as the user who creates the account. To ensure that all users have access to the EVSA Add-In, an Administrator with access to all groups and vehicles in the database should install the Add-In (i.e. the "Data Access" property of the Service Account must be set to "Everything" in the Edit User screen).
The EVSA Add-In requires that the user completing the EVSA has access to all vehicles in the database. In other words, the user's Data Access property must be set to Everything in the MyGeotab Edit User screen.
Please reach out to your Geotab support prime. Contact information can be retrieved by navigating to Getting Started & Help > Support… > Contact from the main menu.
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