It's All a Game, Even Your Volt Stats

After a full day of driving mostly city streets using my best acquired EV driving techniques, I have made it past my last recorded highlight of 47 miles on the guessometer and I'm that much closer to the coveted 50 mile club.

I will admit that when I met my girlfriend for dinner and drinks last night, I took the highway and put the electric motor on hold, using gas so that while I was going 70 miles per hour I would not hurt my EV numbers. Yes, it has gotten that crazy and serious. But remember, I need to drive off that unknown quality gasoline placed in my tank at the dealership. This helps me justify the burning of fossil fuel.

But what I want to share today is the fabulous website that I just found out about called Volt Stats! The exclamation point, to be clear, is part of the name of the site. But it is so exciting that I might have added it anyway. The link is http://voltstats.net and you don't need to own a Volt to sign up but of course, if you have a Volt, you'll have more fun.

The website was started by a Volt owner named Mike Rosak who wanted to know more about how people use their Volts and create a competitive atmosphere for green car drivers. He is not affiliated with Chevrolet in any official capacity but he has an agreement with OnStar that allows him to pull data of vehicles that have signed up and agreed to the user terms on his website. It may very well be that OnStar has an API that can be used by anyone agreeing to certain criteria. 

I signed up my Volt yesterday. The data pulls occur at 10am and 10pm, so I had to wait a few hours to see my Volt appear on the map. The wait was of course excruciating and the thrill I got when I saw my Volt appear on the Owner Map... awesome.

Once you connect your Volt, you will appear in the worldwide owner map. The full map when it loads looks something like this. 

That's a lot of Volts!

I suppose if I was located in South America, the website would know that and would display a different initial map. You can zoom out of course, but it's more interesting to zoom in. When you zoom in repeatedly to where I live, you will eventually see just a few vehicles, and if you hover the one in my zip code (there is only one at this time), you'll see this.

You may be wondering what the different colors represent. The lighter the green, the more efficient the driver. A Volt that reports 255 miles per gallon or higher will be bright green, like mine. Someone driving purely on gasoline will be black on the map, and there are shades of green, as you see, in between.

There are also groups you can join and of course, a leaderboard. Actually, there are several leader boards. Most EV miles driven, most miles driven since using gasoline, etc. As we are finding out in education, if you gamify something, many people will be inspired to work harder to beat their "high score" and best other players. I am living proof that this works, as I will do just about anything to get on the leaderboard, short of walking to work. 

I'm not sure if such game-based sites exist for other EVs but I'm going to look into it. It's interesting to me how the Volt community is so collaborative and cohesive, it seems, in comparison with other EVs. Why do you think that is?