What “beta” means at Akkubrief

The beta mark next to our name means one thing: you cannot buy a certificate yet. The battery check, the connection to your vehicle and your battery history all run in full, free of charge, and signed certificates are already being issued through our field study. What is missing is public evidence of how reliably our method performs across many vehicles, and the last refinements to the method.

What is already final

• The certificate. Layout, content and signature are settled, signed with Ed25519 and verifiable in a buyer's browser.
• The ground rules. Every change to the calculation goes into the change log with a date, every certificate carries the version it was calculated with, and an issued document never changes afterwards.
• Data protection. Read-only access, no waking of the vehicle, encrypted tokens, a masked VIN on the certificate.

What is still outstanding

• The evidence. How stable our estimate is on repetition, and how often a result is produced at all, is what the field study is measuring.
• The calculation. We are still working on the reference figure, the benchmark we hold your measurement against.
• The sale. You cannot buy a certificate yet.
• Further brands. Tesla is live; we are building the VW connection right now, with BMW and Volvo alongside.

Are certificates being issued at all?

Yes. Anyone taking part in the field study receives their signed certificate automatically as soon as the data supports one, and a second four weeks later; an unlock code does the same. Same calculation, same signature, same verification link as later. What you cannot do today is buy one — in place of the purchase button there is a reservation.

Are the figures less accurate during the beta?

Your figure is not a preview to be replaced later by the real one. Every certificate states its uncertainty as a range, for example “91.4% ± 2.4 percentage points”, and that range stays after launch.

We are still working on the method, though. Battery health is a ratio: the usable energy we measure, divided by what the same battery held when new. The second half is a reference figure that depends on the battery pack actually fitted rather than on the model year. Where we can identify the pack instead of merely narrowing it down, the range gets tighter. What improves here is not the measurement of your car, but what we compare it against.

An issued certificate therefore stays as it is, while a later one may carry a different figure even though nothing about your battery has changed. Without a defensible reference figure we issue none at all rather than guess.

How much longer will the beta last?

We name no sales date. We can name the study's dates, because they follow from a rule registered in advance and stand in the study protocol (German).

Sales open after publication. If fewer than 25 vehicles are enrolled on 4 October, the end of enrolment and the cut-off date both move by three weeks. That rule, too, was fixed beforehand.

And if the study goes against us?

Then we publish it anyway. We are examining our own method, and the only thing that defuses that conflict of interest is a protocol fixed before the results. If fewer than 15 vehicles hold a certificate at the cut-off date, a field report without statistics replaces the key figures, and the study is repeated.

What you can already do today

Connect your vehicle. It costs nothing, your battery history starts growing with the first charge, and we email you as soon as sales open. If you sell a few months from now, you will have a grown history instead of a snapshot. Questions we answer personally: get in touch.