Built by Manyways and Scout Environmental for Oshawa Power, the guided “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience encoded NRCan’s EV suitability logic into a self-serve digital tool — collecting first-party, neighbourhood-level data on EV readiness across the city.

TORONTO, Ontario — April 1, 2024 — Manyways Inc., the company behind Decision Support Platform Wayfinder, today announced the successful conclusion of a federally funded EV education pilot developed in partnership with Scout Environmental and Oshawa Power and Utilities Corporation (OPUC). Titled Moving Forwards — Driving Electric Vehicles in Oshawa, the pilot ran from October 11, 2023 through March 31, 2024, and was funded with the support of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) under its Zero Emission Vehicle Awareness Initiative (ZEVAI).

The initiative was designed to address one of the most persistent barriers to EV adoption in Canada: not a shortage of interest, but a shortage of personalized, actionable information. In a period when EV market penetration remained low and public awareness of the practical day-to-day realities of EV ownership was still developing, Moving Forwards offered something distinct — a structured, self-serve digital experience that walked each resident through their own specific circumstances and delivered a clear, individualized answer to a deceptively simple question: is an electric vehicle actually right for me?

Built on the Manyways Wayfinder platform and embedded directly on the Oshawa Power website, the experience functioned as a guided decision journey — modelled on a “Choose Your Own Adventure” format — that engaged residents in a structured conversation about their lives. Rather than presenting generic EV statistics or promotional content, the tool prompted users to answer questions about their daily commute distance, proximity to public charging infrastructure, interest in installing a home charger, financing readiness, and familiarity with available EV models. Drawing on a scoring methodology developed by NRCan, the platform then evaluated each user’s responses and produced a personalized recommendation: whether an EV was a well-suited, decently suited, or poorly suited option for their particular situation. The experience was available in both English and French and met WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards.

Over the course of the five-and-a-half-month pilot, 1,481 Oshawa residents started the guide. Of those, 1,160 shared their interest level in EVs, 752 specified their neighbourhood within the city, and 368 completed enough of the experience to receive a personalized EV suitability score. The majority of scored users landed in the “average” to “good” range — suggesting that EVs are a practical and viable option for a substantial portion of Oshawa’s residential population, a finding with meaningful implications for local charging infrastructure planning and grid investment.

First-party response data, broken down by neighbourhood across more than twenty Oshawa communities, was compiled and submitted to Scout Environmental, NRCan, and Oshawa Power for research and planning purposes at the conclusion of the pilot — representing the most granular, self-reported dataset on EV readiness in Oshawa to date.

Scout Environmental served as the primary content lead and program manager, responsible for the conceptual design of the resident journey and all content production. Oshawa Power led distribution, promoting the guide through monthly resident newsletters, social media channels, and community events — achieving a combined social media reach of over 48,000 across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and email.

“We’re still in the early days of EV adoption in Canada, and a lot of the hesitation comes down to people not having the information they need to feel confident about their own situation. This guide was designed to replace vague awareness with a clear, personalized answer — one grounded in data, not marketing. Whether a resident walked away ready to buy or decided now wasn’t the right time, the goal was the same: give them something they could actually act on.” — Steph Bigue, Founder & CEO, Manyways Inc.

Moving Forwards was built on the Manyways Wayfinder platform, which enables organizations to encode complex expert knowledge and decision logic into structured, deterministic models that can be published as self-serve digital experiences. For this engagement, Manyways handled all front-end development and technical implementation — deploying the interactive guide as a fully embedded, bilingual, WCAG-compliant experience on the Oshawa Power website with support for up to 25 dynamic content nodes. The scoring methodology developed by NRCan was encoded directly into the platform’s decision logic, ensuring that every combination of user inputs produced a consistent, rule-based recommendation without relying on probabilistic AI inference. The platform’s built-in server-side analytics suite generated monthly performance reports used by all three organizational partners throughout the pilot period. The experience is no longer publicly available.

The pilot establishes a replicable model for how utilities, municipal governments, and federal agencies can use structured digital experiences to simultaneously onboard residents to emerging technologies and generate first-party, granular planning data that passive outreach campaigns cannot produce. The combination of personalized guidance and systematic data collection positions Moving Forwards not only as a public education initiative, but as a pilot for a new category of community intelligence tool.

About Manyways
Manyways Inc. is a Toronto-based software company that builds decision support systems for organizations operating in complex, rules-driven environments. Its platform enables teams to encode expert knowledge into interactive digital tools — such as eligibility screeners, product configurators, and guided decision experiences — that deliver precise, reliable outcomes at scale.

About Scout Environmental
Scout Environmental is a Toronto-based non-profit organization that designs and delivers programs to improve environmental health. Working with government, corporate, and community partners, Scout produces evidence-based tools and campaigns that empower Canadians to make informed choices for their families and communities.

About Oshawa Power and Utilities Corporation
Oshawa Power and Utilities Corporation (OPUC) is the municipally owned electricity distributor serving the City of Oshawa, Ontario. OPUC delivers reliable electricity service to residential, commercial, and industrial customers across the region and is committed to supporting the transition to clean energy technologies, including electric vehicles and distributed energy resources.

About Natural Resources Canada
Natural Resources Canada is the federal department responsible for ensuring that Canada’s natural resources benefit all Canadians. Through programs such as the Zero Emission Vehicle Awareness Initiative (ZEVAI), NRCan supports public education and community-level action on zero-emission vehicle adoption, clean energy transitions, and the reduction of Canada’s carbon footprint.