Tennessee Valley Authority Looks Toward the Future with EV's

In this short video, we walk you through the first few phases of a design project we led for TVA (TN Valley Authority) to better understand EV's (electric vehicles) and their place in the future of driving! In this video, you can see the TVA team leading empathy work, unpacking their interviews and synthesizing what they learned, brainstorming some big ideas, then building and testing low fidelity prototypes with potential users to gain feedback and a better understanding for the next phase of this project.

Transcript

We ship vehicles all over, and it’s about relationships.

Sure.

You know, as well, yeah that's gonna be the thing, you know, the TVA is gonna find themselves, is building this relationship in that market.

It's-- this is about, you know, like I said, it's these emotional, you know, people are wanting to be, they want to be the cool person, I want to be the person that, you know, gets ahead of the curve.

200 bucks in maintenance in 200,000 miles and ton of fuel savings because the first 40 miles of this are all electric.

I think a year, maybe more, of free charging with Blink.

How did you get all this? How'd you find all that?

We just found out when we went to look at it, they said this was available. 

Plus we got a $2500 rebate from the state of Tennessee.

I think they're definitely the future.

Well I do know that they're efficient.

I don't think-- I wouldn't say it would be environment or political, I think honestly a lot of people probably just wouldn't buy it because of the price.

Not many people I know have one. In fact nobody I know has one.

I know I don't see very many of them. Not in some of the underserved populations here in Nashville. 

I think we got a lot accomplished. We have some new learnings this week.

I mean there is a lot going on with the papers all over the wall in there and it's everything on that paper represents something we learned from somebody, or as a learning that we had from each other and so it's pretty fun when you get to the end of the week, ou see everything all across all the walls and you realize how much we've done, how much we thought about, how much we've invested.

We had interviewed over 50 consumers and dealers, we talked to people from LPC's and businesses with fleets, and so we came in with kind of five core insights, we came up with hundreds of ideas.

We selected a few of those ideas, we tested 21 ideas and now I think we're excited about like six or seven of them to move forward, into a next level experiment. 

Yeah so we're really, you know, honing in on some of those insights. Learning from people as we interact with them.

You know, they need a reason to be excited, the environment alone, the cost piece aren't enough, they still need that education piece, they really need the rationale, the facts, something believable, something tangible.

That's where we're headed next, to excite people within TVA, and to continue excited consumers to get on board with electric vehicles.