Vehicle Emissions Tracker, AI Fluency Guides, and Platform-Wide Updates

Vehicle Emissions Tracker, AI Fluency Guides, and Platform-Wide Updates

A packed day of updates across the platform. Here's everything that shipped today.

Vehicle CO2 Emissions & EV Adoption

We've launched a dedicated Vehicle Emissions page under the Biosphere Observatory, tracking the Isle of Man's transport carbon footprint and the transition to electric vehicles.

What's on the page

• Fleet-wide CO2 statistics — average emissions per vehicle, reduction since peak, and estimated annual fleet emissions (~195,000 tonnes/year)
• 7 interactive charts — CO2 trend by registration year, EV & hybrid adoption, cumulative EV fleet growth, emissions by fuel type, annual emissions by category, average CO2 by category, and a "What If More Cars Were Electric?" scenario model
• CO2 imputation — only 68% of active vehicles have a recorded CO2 value. We estimate the rest by matching to the average of the same make and model, falling back to make-level and then category-level averages. Pure EVs are assigned 0 g/km. This brings coverage to approximately 93%
• Isle of Man vs UK comparison — side-by-side fleet averages and EV adoption rates, with a dashed reference line on the CO2 trend chart showing the UK fleet average (119.7 g/km, DfT/DVLA Sep 2025)
• Why IoM EV adoption is slower — cost (shipping premium via the Steam Packet), limited charging infrastructure (~130-140 public chargers), and no MOT requirement meaning older high-emission vehicles stay on the road indefinitely

The No-MOT Effect

The Isle of Man has no compulsory vehicle testing. The result is some remarkable survivors in the active fleet. The oldest actively-licensed vehicle is a 1904 New Orleans Voiturette — 122 years old. There's a 1924 Ford Model T, 105 Morris vehicles (none newer than 1987), 11 Reliants, 3 Hillmans, and exactly one white 1987 Lada Riva still on the road.

7.9% of the fleet (6,292 vehicles) is over 25 years old. We estimate that introducing MOT testing at the UK rate of $54.85 would generate approximately $4M per year in test fees. Almost certainly unpopular, but it would accelerate retirement of high-emission vehicles and improve road safety.

EV Scenario Modelling

The "What If" chart shows estimated CO2 if a percentage of cars were replaced with zero-emission EVs. At 50% EV adoption, the island would save approximately 79,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. The chart uses stacked bars — green for saved emissions, red for remaining — so you can see the proportion shift as EV adoption increases.

Enhanced Vehicle Query Tool

The Vehicle Query Tool has been significantly improved:

• Query speed: optimised from 30 seconds to under 1 second. The bottleneck was COALESCE in WHERE clauses preventing SQL Server index seeks. We now pre-resolve display names to raw values, then query directly against the indexed columns
• Model loading: fixed a 20-second delay when selecting a make — same pre-resolve pattern
• Vehicle list: paginated results table showing make, model, variant, colour, fuel, wheels, and CO2 — displayed immediately under the match count
• Alphabetical sorting: all dropdowns now sort alphabetically by default
• Title case: fuel types and colours display as Title Case instead of ALL CAPS

AI Fluency Guides for Job Seekers & Employers

Inspired by Zapier's AI Fluency Rubric V2, we've added AI-generated fluency guides to the Job Centre.

The framework assesses four dimensions: Mindset (orientation toward AI), Strategy (deliberate implementation), Building (creating workflows and systems), and Accountability (critical evaluation of AI outputs).

For Candidates

Each occupation now has a guide showing specific behaviours and examples across all four dimensions, plus quick wins you can action this week, AI tools to learn, and the one thing that separates good from exceptional in that role.

For Employers

The employer tab provides signals to look for during hiring, tailored interview questions, a practical skills test idea, red flags that indicate a candidate hasn't embedded AI into their work, and team integration tips for onboarding.

Guides are generated per O*NET occupation code, so all jobs sharing the same occupation get the same advice — no redundant AI calls. Browse any job listing and click the AI Fluency button, or view the guide directly from the job detail page.

Planning Applications on the Biosphere Map

Planning applications are now overlaid on the biosphere ecosystem health hex map, letting you visualise development pressure alongside biodiversity data. This helps answer questions like: are planning approvals concentrated in ecologically sensitive areas?

Parish-level data has been cleaned up — duplicate entries caused by ALL CAPS vs Title Case variants have been normalised, and canonical parish names are now consistent across the platform.

Security: axios Supply Chain Check

This morning we reviewed the axios supply chain vulnerability affecting versions published between March 25-29. Our axios dependency was already pinned to a clean version (1.13.6) and we confirmed no compromised code was present in our node_modules. The caret has been removed from the version specifier to prevent accidental upgrades to a potentially affected version.

Biosphere Navigation Restructure

The Biosphere mega menu has been reorganised. The Monitoring column has been slimmed down, and a new Environment row spans the bottom of the dropdown with Vehicle Emissions, Planning Impact, and Biosphere Advisor grouped together.

What's Next

• Completing AI fluency guide generation for all ~500 active occupations
• UK comparative data as reference lines across more charts
• Continued performance optimisation across the platform
• More IoT sensor integrations as the Smart Farm network expands