Vehicle-2-Grid Availability Study

TITLE: V2G Availability Field Study PROTOCOL NO.: None WCG IRB Protocol #20253869 SPONSOR: Toyota Research Institute INVESTIGATOR: Alexandre Leo Stephen Filipowicz, BA, MA, PhD 4440 El Camino Real Los Altos, California 94022 United States STUDY-RELATED PHONE NUMBER(S): 1-888-211-8162 (24 hours) Taking part in this research is voluntary. You may decide not to participate, or you may leave the study at any time. Your decision will not result in any penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. If you have any questions, concerns, or complaints or think this research has hurt you, talk to the research team at the phone number(s) listed in this document. You are being invited to participate in a research study titled “V2G Availability Field Study.” This study is being conducted by Toyota Research Institute (“TRI”). Please read the text below to understand what to expect. Why is Toyota doing this research study? Toyota Research Institute (“TRI”) has a team of scientists seeking to understand how people make decisions about their vehicles. We plan to run studies and collect data to understand general principles, and we will use the findings to make recommendations for future products and services. We may publish the results of this study in an academic journal. If we publish research in a journal, you will not be identified. Who can participate in this research study? For this study, participants must be a SDG&E customer, be at least 18 years of age, and own or lease at least one Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) that is compatible with our system. What will I be asked to do and how much time will it take? The goal of this study is to identify when BEV owners may or may not want to participate in a Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) program. During this study you will be sent daily phone notifications and short surveys during a 4 week period. If you agree to take part in this study, you will first be asked to download an app and register for the study. This study uses the “Samply Research” app to send notifications, which can be downloaded from either the App Store or Play Store. You will be asked to create a log in and provide some details about yourself, including home and work addresses and your SDG&E electricity rate plan. These addresses will be saved on a secure server and used to identify where you and your vehicle are when you respond to a notification with respect to these locations and to monitor your vehicle’s location when you accept to make it available for V2G. For analysis purposes, your phone and vehicle locations will be coded using a location label (e.g., “home”, “work”, “other”). Address, phone, and vehicle location data will be kept on a confidential server managed by TRI and will never be shared with any outside parties. You will additionally be asked to authorize a data collection service called SmartCar to allow us access to certain information about your BEV, specifically your vehicle’s location, charging status, battery level, and vehicle make, model, and year. During the main study, the Samply App will send you daily phone notifications that will link you to short surveys that will open up in your phone’s browser. Some of these surveys will ask that you share your location. You will know that the survey would like to access your location if your phone browser asks you to “Allow” location tracking. We ask that you always select “Allow”, which will only give us your location at the time you start your survey (no additional information about your location will be collected before or after this point). You will be asked to have the Samply Research app installed on your phone for the duration of the study. At the end of the research study, you will be allowed to delete the app if you wish. If you do not agree to these described levels of access, please do not participate in the research study. During the main study we will also access the information about your vehicle listed above. We will only access this information when you respond to a survey, and during periods when you agree to make your vehicle available for V2G. If you indicate that you are able to make your BEV available, you will be asked to plug-in your vehicle at home and allow us to stop the charging as a way to simulate the behavior expected of real V2G participants. Please note that no electric charge will be drawn from the battery. We will then monitor the charging state and location of your vehicle for a period specified in the notification. Please note that moving forward with this study will require you to agree to SmartCar’s terms of service and privacy policy, as well as consent to connect your BEV’s connected services account so that we can access data for this research study through the SmartCar service. If you do not agree to such terms, please do not participate in the research study. After completing the main part of the study, you will be asked to complete a closing survey with questions about what you do in different real or hypothetical situations. This survey will include questions about your driving and charging habits, personal preferences, and questions related to your experience during the study. If there are questions you do not want to answer for privacy reasons, you may select the option which says “Prefer not to answer”. This survey/questionnaire will take you approximately 15 minutes to complete. This research study will take place over four weeks. On days and times where you are interested in making your vehicle available, the time required to participate will be no longer than the time required to plug-in your vehicle and schedule changing with an app. For your participation you will be paid $50 once you have registered for the study, downloaded and installed the study app, and successfully registered your vehicle. You will receive an additional $350 once you have completed the 4 week study and the closing survey. Both payments will be made as gift cards from select vendors (e.g. Amazon, Target, etc). You will also receive an additional incentive at the end of the study in the form of a gift card to select vendors (e.g., Amazon, Target, etc) based on the amount of time you allowed your vehicle to be available for our simulated V2G study. This additional payment rate will vary throughout the study and the amount you will be eligible to receive will be communicated to you via phone notification every time you are requested to make your vehicle available. Your alternative is to not participate in this study. Will being in this research study help me in any way? You may not directly benefit from this research; however, we hope that your participation in the study may help researchers understand human decision making for academic purposes and perhaps lead to a future commercial product or service. What are my risks of being in this research study? Apart from the risks of any mobile phone based activity, such as eye-strain or distracted driving, we believe there are minimal risks associated with this research study; however, a risk of breach of confidentiality always exists and we have taken the steps to minimize this risk as outlined below. To address concerns about distracted driving, we ask that you interact with the app for this study only when your BEV is parked and turned off. Please use the app safely and in accordance with all applicable laws. How will my personal information be protected? To the best of our ability, your data in this study will remain confidential. Study data are only associated with an anonymous user identifier. TRI researchers will only have access to your study data, and they will not attempt to re-identify participants. After removing all identifying information (e.g., removing addresses), data collected under this project may be posted in online data repositories. In addition, we may share anonymized data collected under this project with TRI affiliates. There is a possibility that your deidentified information may be used or distributed for future research studies without your additional informed consent. The study staff may share your private information and the records generated from this research with WCG IRB, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) overseeing this research. An IRB is a group of scientists, physicians and non-scientists who review human research studies with participant safety and research ethics in mind. IRBs may request information collected from this study, including personal information, to confirm that the research has been conducted correctly. Who can I talk to if I have questions? If you have questions about this project or if you have a research-related problem, you may contact us through the Help page in the Samply Research app, by calling 1-888-211-8162, or by emailing auto_app_tech_support@escalent.co. This research is being overseen by WCG IRB. An IRB is a group of people who perform independent review of research studies. You may talk to them at 855-818-2289 or clientcare@wcgclinical.com if: • You have questions, concerns, or complaints that are not being answered by the research team. • You are not getting answers from the research team. • You cannot reach the research team. • You want to talk to someone else about the research. • You have questions about your rights as a research subject. By clicking “I agree” below you are indicating that you are at least 18 years old, have read this consent form and agree to participate in this research study. Please print a copy of this page for your records.