Thursday, December 9, 2010

Electrical Vehicle Survey

The most exciting project that I had was the last project I worked on. It was decided that PTS needed to know what other leading universities were doing in the way of accommodating electrical vehicles. Now I do not mean golf carts and such, I am referring to cars such as the volt, the leaf and the electric Mini Cooper. Yes I did say that electric Mini Cooper. The city of San Diego has seven of them that are used for meter reading, parking control, and several other city departments have access to them. Ray gave me a list of universities and contacts that he wanted me to reach out to and find out what they were doing.

The first thing that I did was create a questionnaire that asked all the pertinent questions that Ray wanted answered. I then created an updated the contact list into a single document that included full contact information such as extension numbers and e-mail addresses. The next step was the hardest part; I called each person on the contact list and tried to get the questionnaire answered. This led to several rounds of phone tag, e-mails back and forth, and finding out that this person is not involved with this you need to talk to so-and-so and department Y. who says that you need to speak to department X. was on vacation for the next two weeks. Getting the questionnaires answered was very frustrating but in the end I had a 90% completion rate. Next I created and filled in a matrix with all of the information received. I then compiled a report for Ray with all of the information received. I also researched and found various companies and government agencies that are working with universities to increase this infrastructure.

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