Case study: Recurrent accelerates EV integrations for battery analytics

Using Smartcar’s EV APIs, Recurrent makes used EV sales transparent and simple.

About Recurrent

Recurrent makes buying used EVs more straightforward and transparent. It is the world’s first company to offer battery condition reports for used electric cars. Both private buyers and dealerships can use Recurrent’s platform to receive reports about a vehicle’s true range as the battery ages. The company has built proprietary predictive algorithms to generate its battery condition reports.

Recurrent’s challenge

To train its predictive models, Recurrent needed to create a large data pool that would span thousands of EVs across different makes, models, years, and geographies. Accessing data from vehicles across manufacturers turned out to be a critical challenge for the company.

Solution

Recurrent decided to use Smartcar’s technology to accelerate the training process for its predictive algorithms.

Recurrent uses the Smartcar platform to retrieve vehicle and EV battery information from subscribers who sign up for monthly battery reports. Vehicle owners connect securely through Smartcar and authorize access to four permissions with just a few clicks from Recurrent’s website. Recurrent then uses Smartcar’s APIs to monitor each vehicle’s mileage, range estimates, state of charge, and charging status to train its battery performance algorithms.

Results

Recurrent was able to successfully onboard over 1,300 vehicles within the first month to help provide respective owners with battery performance reports. Since then, the company has onboarded and retrieved data from thousands of EVs every day, leading to nearly 5 million unique data points across 18 different EV models.

This has allowed Recurrent to train its machine learning models on EV battery degradation and build the richest cross-manufacturer EV battery data set in the field today.

“As a pre-seed startup in a competitive industry, we needed to get to market quickly. We were fortunate enough to find Smartcar right from the start,” said Recurrent CEO and Co-Founder Scott Case. “Without a doubt, the Smartcar integration accelerated us by 6 to 12 months and millions of dollars of engineering work compared to building and maintaining API connections to individual auto manufacturers.”