Hands up if you’ve ever bought a car based on its fuel efficiency rating, only to find it wasn’t accurate.
Wow, that’s a lot of hands.
A Waterloo-based company has devised a way to solve this problem – and has entered it in a competition sponsored by the White House, happening this week.
The company is CrossChasm and its latest product, MyCarma, enables drivers to obtain their own personal mileage ratings based on how they, and they alone, use their vehicles.
In other words, MyCarma – a free mobile app that works through your GPS-enabled smartphone – can accurately calculate what any vehicle’s gas mileage will be, for you specifically, before you buy it. This can mean significant reductions in cost, emissions and buyer’s remorse from choosing the wrong car.
“We are seeing that people are ultimately happier and, in general, it helps people buy more fuel-efficient cars that are smart financial decisions for them,” Matt Stevens, CEO of CrossChasm, said in an interview with Communitech.
CrossChasm’s MyCarma is in the thick of competition in the Apps for Vehicles Challenge, part of the U.S. government’s Challenge.gov initiative that spurs innovators to solve pressing problems. Theirs is among seven apps vying for the title in voting that began this past Monday and ends this coming Monday at 9 a.m. EDT.
More than the $34,000 in prize money, the company is aiming to change the way people buy cars, Stevens said.
“We think that MyCarma could have massive impact,” he said, “and to have a U.S. Department of Energy/White House competition be our launching ground to actually raise some awareness around this, I think would be amazing.”
The MyCarma mobile app is the latest iteration of the research CrossChasm has been doing since 2005, when Stevens and a group of fellow University of Waterloo grad students began competing with 17 universities in a three-year efficient-vehicle-design competition sponsored by General Motors and the U.S. Department of Energy.
They scored highly, and in 2007, decided to try and commercialize their academic work in the form of a consulting firm for the auto industry. The company incorporated that year and moved into the Accelerator Centre, where it found the mentorship and support it needed to survive, Stevens said.
Its modelling software evaluated vehicle designs for fuel efficiency, enabling CrossChasm to help automakers to decide which designs to move off the drawing board and onto the assembly line.
“Because of that, we started getting pulled in by fleets who were buying some of the vehicles that were supposed to get X miles per gallon, and instead were getting much less than X,” Stevens said.
“After doing that five or six times, we said, ‘There has to be a way where we can play prevention rather than clean-up,” he said, “because when we looked into it, it was always because people were driving their vehicles differently than how that fuel-economy label is made.”
And so, in 2010, CrossChasm launched FleetCarma, “which was basically know before you buy whether it’s a smart idea.” It uses a small device called a logger that fleet owners could install in each vehicle for three weeks to gather data on individual drivers’ activities, and thus guide them on subsequent vehicle purchases.
MyCarma, developed in the latter part of 2012, is “the same thing, but for individuals,” Stevens said. The reasoning behind it is clear: “Someone in downtown New York does not drive the same as someone in Des Moines, Iowa,” which renders generic fuel-economy labels inaccurate for many people.
Stevens, whose company employs 25 people in Waterloo, Montreal and Troy, Mich., believes MyCarma’s ease of use for individual drivers could unlock massive growth potential for CrossChasm.
While free to drivers, auto dealers have proved willing to pay for MyCarma as a way to enhance the car-buying experience, Stevens said, in explaining how the product makes money.
“CrossChasm, the consulting part, has done really well, but our goal has always been to be a scalable, sustainable product company that could have a really massive impact,” he said. FleetCarma has also done well and continues to grow, “but if anything has rocket potential, it’s MyCarma.”
Stevens hopes a win at the Apps for Vehicles Challenge provides some of the fuel for that rocket, in the form of consumer awareness.
“We are seeing that people are ultimately happier, and in general, it helps people to buy more fuel-efficient cars,” he said. “For us, it’s green and green; it’s saving you money and emissions while you pick [the vehicle] that’s personal to you; that’s best for you."
