Release Notes

2026-08-27 — ROVER approvals

A new public page at /rover mirroring the Australian Government's register of road vehicle type approvals. Before any new model can be sold in Australia it needs one, and the department publishes every approval — but ten records to a page, with no way to sort, filter or watch it. This keeps a copy that is checked continuously.

Finding things

• All ~9,250 approvals, searchable by make, model, the name the car is actually sold under, the approval holder or the VTA number.
• Opens on passenger vehicles, newest by commencement date. Light commercial (utes, vans, light trucks) is one chip away, and every category — trailers, buses, heavy goods, motorcycles — is another.
• Sort by commencement date, current approval date, most recently updated or amended, or by make.
• Filter by make, ADR category, power type, approval status, and by when the approval commenced.

Photographs

• Each approval's Road Vehicle Descriptor carries the front and rear pictures the manufacturer lodged with its application — often a car in a factory car park rather than a press render, and usually the first public images of a model months before it launches here. Nothing on the ROVER site links to that page from the approvals list, so it is only reachable by building the address.
• Open any approval to see them. Photographs remain the approval holder's, and the department states it has not verified them.

Electric or not

• ROVER never states how a vehicle is powered, but each approval lists the Australian Design Rules it had to meet, and two of those only apply to particular drivetrains: ADR 109 covers electric power train safety and ADR 110 hydrogen.
• The label reads "electrified" rather than "electric" on purpose: a Tesla Model Y and a RAV4 Hybrid comply with exactly the same rules, and nothing published separates them. Approvals granted before ADR 109 existed are marked "not stated" rather than guessed at.

Safety ratings

• Approvals are matched to ANCAP's published ratings by make and model.
• A star count only appears when a single ANCAP rating covers that approval's build period. Where several apply — a Landcruiser was rated five stars for VX and Sahara but four for GX and GXL over the same years — the badge links to ANCAP without claiming a number, because there isn't one.

New vs updated

• A brand new approval and an amended one are shown differently. Hovering the "Updated" badge shows exactly what changed, such as a status moving from In Force to Suspended.
• A republish on its own does not count as a change, because ROVER moves that date on approvals whose details are identical.

Alerts

• Subscribe to be told when a car is approved, filtered by make, power type or category. The register is checked every 30 minutes and alerts arrive by email or Pushover.
• Browsing the page needs no account. Subscribing does, and you can sign up from the page itself — the link brings you straight back to /rover rather than the dashboard.

An approval is permission to supply a vehicle type to the Australian market. It is not a launch date, a price, or a promise the model will be sold here. Always check ROVER itself before relying on any of it.

v1.1.0 – 2025-05-17

• Admin badge for uncontacted interest signups
• Sidebar refactored to components
• Badge overlays icon instead of tooltip
• Terms of Use and Privacy modal linked in register
• Registration checkbox required to continue
• Contact page placeholder added
• Domain updated to evconduit.com
• Project renamed to EVConduit (previously EVLink)

v1.0.0 – 2025-05-10

• Landing page redesign (Hero, Pricing, Features)
• New responsive Footer with icon links (GitHub, Coffee, Facebook)
• Register form refactor (modular components)
• Admin panel for viewing and approving users
• Webhook monitor via cron + manual trigger
• Interest signup endpoint + view
• Supabase Auth (magic link + GitHub login)
• Vehicle linking and real-time cache update
• Enode integration for XPeng, Tesla, etc.
• Public status dashboard with webhook bar
• Session + JWT handling in Next.js frontend
• Refactored API routes (FastAPI) with Supabase storage