RUC on Rails Takes New Zealand’s RUC Consumer Research to Melbourne

RUC on Rails founder and CEO Adam Johnston has presented the company’s latest research into New Zealand driver expectations at the ITS Australia Global Summit in Melbourne.

Johnston presented New Zealand’s RUC Transition: What Solutions Are Everyday Drivers Expecting?, exploring what changes when Road User Charges move beyond their traditional diesel, fleet and heavy-vehicle customer base and become a product used by millions of everyday motorists.

The presentation formed part of the ITS Australia Global Summit, held in Melbourne from 22–24 September and attended by transport technology, road charging and intelligent transport specialists from Australia and internationally.

Rather than focusing solely on the technology required to deliver Road User Charges, Johnston used the presentation to look at the other side of the equation: what drivers are actually prepared to use.

“New Zealand has had RUC since 1977, so we’re not really creating RUC from scratch,” says Johnston.

“What is changing quite dramatically is the customer.”

“The existing market has largely been built around diesel vehicles, fleets and commercial transport. We’re now preparing for several million everyday light-vehicle drivers who have never had to purchase RUC before.”

“That creates a very different product-design problem.”

The presentation drew on RUC on Rails’ independent field research with 1,098 New Zealand light-vehicle drivers, around 80 percent of whom had not previously operated a RUC-liable vehicle.

The research looked at consumer expectations across RUC technology, automation, hardware, privacy, payment behaviour and purchasing.

One of the strongest themes presented in Melbourne was that greater automation does not necessarily translate directly into greater consumer demand.

When drivers were given a choice between managing RUC through a phone app or having it automatically managed through connected telematics, 68 percent preferred the phone app, while 17 percent selected the automated telematics option.

Johnston says the result challenges a natural assumption within the intelligent transport sector.

“If you approach RUC purely as a technology problem, there is a very logical instinct to automate everything.”

“Connect the vehicle, measure the distance automatically, know when RUC is running low and bill the driver automatically.”

“That can be an incredibly elegant technical solution. But when you actually ask light-vehicle drivers what they want, the picture becomes more complicated.”

Hardware produced a similarly mixed response.

When respondents were asked whether they would consider joining a RUC provider if they were required to physically install a device in their vehicle, 38 percent said no, 35 percent said maybe and 27 percent said yes.

Price created another constraint.

Thirty-four percent said they would pay nothing for a dedicated RUC hardware solution, another 34 percent would pay no more than $15, and a further 22 percent capped their willingness to pay at $30.

That meant 90 percent of respondents placed their maximum willingness to pay at $30 or less.

Privacy also featured prominently in the presentation.

RUC on Rails’ research found 64 percent of drivers surveyed were uncomfortable with continuous GPS-based vehicle location tracking.

Johnston cautioned against interpreting those results as evidence that New Zealand drivers are resistant to technology altogether.

When drivers were asked how they would prefer to confirm distance travelled, 61 percent selected entering their own odometer reading into an app, compared with 24 percent who preferred automatic GPS measurement.

In another comparison, 72 percent preferred taking a smartphone photo of their odometer, while 16 percent selected a plugged-in GPS device.

“That was probably one of the more useful signals in the research,” says Johnston.

“Drivers are clearly comfortable using technology to make RUC easier.”

“What they appear much more sensitive to is the trade-off attached to that convenience — whether that is cost, privacy or how much control they give up.”

The presentation also covered the broader consumer challenge facing New Zealand’s RUC transition.

RUC on Rails’ research found only 42 percent of surveyed drivers considered themselves fully aware of the upcoming changes, while 38 percent had seen headlines without knowing much detail and 20 percent said they were unaware of the transition.

Johnston told the Summit that this means companies entering the future consumer RUC market will need to solve more than the technical side of road charging.

“The technology can be brilliant, but the driver still needs to understand what problem it solves, what it is going to cost them and why they should choose that particular solution.”

For RUC on Rails, the findings have contributed to a broader design principle around the consumer side of Road User Charges.

The company believes future RUC products should make purchasing and managing RUC significantly easier while being careful not to remove control that motorists still value.

That idea became the closing message of Johnston’s presentation:

“Remove RUC’s administrative friction, without removing driver control.”

The Melbourne appearance follows Johnston’s presentation at T-TECH 2026 in Auckland earlier this year and continues RUC on Rails’ work around the consumer side of New Zealand’s emerging light-vehicle RUC market.

RUC on Rails has made its wider consumer research publicly available, covering consumer psychology, technology and automation preferences, billing behaviour, privacy and product design.

Johnston says presenting the work internationally was also an opportunity to put the New Zealand consumer perspective into a wider road-charging conversation.

“New Zealand is in a pretty unusual position.”

“We have decades of experience with Road User Charges, but we’re now confronting the completely different challenge of designing RUC for the everyday driver.”

“There are a lot of sophisticated technologies available to solve that problem. Our message in Melbourne was simply that the customer still needs to come with us.”

Presentation materials

• Transcript - Link

• Slides - Link