New Zealand electric vehicle transition technology that supports sustainable transport wins big at national industry awards
Wellington-based Critchlow Geospatial are honoured and delighted that their SwitchMyFleet solution has been announced as the winner of the Technical Excellence category at the New Zealand Spatial Excellence Awards held in Wellington on 10 February 2022.
This is another triumph for the Critchlow Geospatial team who was the global winner of the Location-Based Services category at the internationally acclaimed Geospatial World Innovation Awards 2021 held in Amsterdam, Netherlands in October 2021.
Developed with New Zealand government co-funding through the Low Emission Vehicles Contestable Fund (LEVCF) administered by the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), SwitchMyFleet has been developed to accelerate the uptake of commercial electric vehicles to support more sustainable transport systems. It is a practical tool that gives people the ability to assess their EV requirements by answering the question “What do we need, based on where we go and what our payload is?”.
SwitchMyFleet is the free online evaluation tool for businesses developing a business case for transitioning their fleet to electric vehicles. It demonstrates the viability of electric vans and trucks in the user’s real-world environment, allowing the user to test different vehicle types and battery sizes to determine their optimal fleet requirements. SwitchMyFleet has been engineered so that EVs return to base with comfortable levels of spare battery.
SwitchMyFleet is powered by authoritative address and 3-dimensional road network data from NationalMap that is combined with route optimisation algorithms that balance time, distance, and energy use to calculate the metrics that fleet operators and transport businesses need to build their business cases for transition.
It is this combination of the complex datasets and algorithms with the user’s own real-world fleet configuration and route inputs that makes SwitchMyFleet so powerfully practical and unique in the world.
Richard Briggs, Manager, Transport Portfolio, at EECA had this to say on learning about Critchlow Geospatial’s national award success, “We are pleased that Critchlow Geospatial has been recognised at a national level for their team’s ability to bring together the physics of moving vehicles, New Zealand geospatial data, and route optimisation algorithms to build a free online tool to enable our transport sector to make the transition from ICE to electric, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving costs.”
Critchlow Geospatial Group’s Group Managing Director, Steve Critchlow says, “We’re thrilled that the efforts of our team have been recognised with these awards, which are a real validation of the potential for SwitchMyFleet to have a global impact, one that can help accelerate not just New Zealand, but the whole world towards more sustainable transport systems.”
For more information about Critchlow Geospatial and SwitchMyFleet, visit the web pages below:
- https://www.critchlow.co.nz/
- https://www.critchlow.co.nz/products/switchmyfleet
- https://www.critchlow.co.nz/challenging-our-assumptions-about-commercial-evs-will-they-make-the-grade
About Critchlow Geospatial
Since 1991, Critchlow Geospatial have been a guide to organisations wanting to leverage location intelligence to make the smart, insightful decisions that improve their business performance.
For more information, contact:
Steve Critchlow, Group Managing Director
Critchlow Geospatial Limited
Level 6, iCentre, 50 Manners Street, Wellington
Phone: +64 21 702 130
Email: steve.critchlow@critchlow
