Our fleet

As part of our mission to fully evaluate the usefulness of plug-in hybrid technology, RechargeIT has created a test fleet of cars and data acquisition system to collect actual data on the performance of these vehicles, and make all data available to the public. The fleet consists of conventional Prius and Ford Escape Hybrid cars as well as several Prius and Ford Escapes that have been retrofitted to become plug-in hybrid vehicles. The data acquisition system is used to collect data from both the conventional hybrids and the plug-in vehicles for comparison. See how the test fleet is performing below under real world conditions, with hundreds of different drivers in a variety of driving conditions. Some average higher mileage, some average lower mileage; sometimes lower mileage resulted because people drove with the hybrid battery pack turned off or failed to charge the pack itself. Read more about our methodology and the numbers behind the calculations.

 

Model

MPG

Wh/mile

CO2e/mile

Our Cars

Toyota Prius

44.6

—

0.530

Garamba
Kilimanjaro

Toyota Prius Plug-in

66.2

110.6

0.411

Comoe
Galapagos
Great Barrier Reef
Machu Picchu

Methodology

All of these cars are outfitted with data recording devices that track technical and environmental performance, use patterns and charging history. Above, you can see the actual data which is uploaded from the vehicles. Both electricity and gasoline use data is being used to calculate the total energy use for each vehicle to get "real world" performance data on these cars. In order to compare this data to other cars under similar conditions, we are equipping existing stock hybrids and conventional cars with the same data recording devices. With this data, we hope to be able to measure more realistic mpg efficiency of plug-ins over conventional gas and hybrid vehicles.

The system to collect data from our fleet consists of a laptop, a wireless data card, laptop power management hardware, a GPS and an AC power monitoring device to monitor charge power. The laptop is connected to the vehicle's CANbus (a data bus present in all new vehicles), and collects relevant data such as speed, distance driven, fuel use, and Prius battery information. Information from the extended hybrid battery, such as voltage, current, charge state and battery temperature, is also accessed and archived for data analysis.

During charging, the system monitors and records the AC charge power. GPS is used by the fleet manager to track the vehicle's location, and in the future may be used to plot vehicle data against altitude. All this data is periodically uploaded to our servers via a wireless connection, which allows for near-real time updates to the data displayed on our website. In addition to the data collected on board, we use a fleet fueling card that accurately records the amount of fuel used by each car which is then uploaded to our servers and used for the miles-per-gallon calculation.

Once all the data is uploaded to our servers, any necessary calculations are done (such as calculating CO2), and the data is graphed and displayed on our website. Data is available at the fleet level, individual car level and event the trip level. If you would like to dig deeper, soon you will able to download the raw data from any trip to do additional analysis offline.