To help people understand how range works with electric vehicle batteries, we choose to make it as relatable as possible – by tapping into the one battery-powered device we’re always paying attention to: our phones. We wrote a unique line of code that allows a web banner to read your Android phone’s battery percentage. When our banner appears, it will tell you how much battery your phone has left and then will tell you have far that battery percentage will drive you in the Bolt EV.

Our resident programming geniuses figured out a way to write coding into a web banner that reads your phone’s batter percentage. From there, we created a simple conversion table. We knew that a full charge (100%) in the Bolt EV would drive 520km, so 99% would be 515km, and so on. We corresponded each battery percentage to the distance you can drive. Some clever hacking, a little basic math, and one effective web banner.

Honestly, we thought this was a smart and creative idea, but we had no idea how effective it would end up being. Regular visitors to the Bolt EV webpage was averaging 50 per day for the week prior to the launch of our banner. In the first 24 hours of the banner going live, traffic increased 15X to 750 total visits. Not bad for a $650 media buy.