Facilitating Data-Driven Policy in the Electric Vehicle Market: Introducing the Caret Suite

Policymakers face an uphill challenge in the vehicle electrification transition and generally lack comprehensive tools to guide and evaluate their decisions, especially in the long term. At the 36th Electric Vehicle Symposium and Exposition (EVS36), Donald Hoard, CSE’s director of data science, analytics and quantitative research, reviewed three modules of the Caret® software suite designed to allow stakeholders in the electric vehicle (EV) market to develop effective strategies, make informed decisions, accelerate equitable EV adoption and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Caret EV Planner

This interactive platform models and forecasts incentive policies for the light-duty transportation sector. It helps evaluate the impacts of current or proposed policies, allowing data-driven choices for accelerating EV adoption and reducing emissions at a low cost and/or in less time.

Caret EV Infrastructure Planner

The lack of public charging infrastructure hinders EV adoption and must be addressed through government and private investments. Caret EV Infrastructure Planner offers data-driven planning and analysis that is network- and vendor-neutral to efficiently address this barrier and automate the siting of EV chargers to meet policymakers’ goals.

Caret EV Charging Knowledgebase

The U.S. needs over 2 million public and workplace charging ports by 2030. If 50% are "smart" chargers, they could generate 40+ terabytes of data daily describing the evolving real-world behavior of EV drivers. Caret EV Charging Knowledgebase stores, processes and analyzes this data to show how, when and where chargers are being used, improving charger siting and ensuring uptime requirements are met.