MoT Fleet Statistics NZ

Goal

Discover and extract public Ministry of Transport annual vehicle fleet workbook tables with a read-only, keyless CLI.

Use This When

• A user asks for New Zealand annual vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT)
• A workflow needs Ministry annual fleet workbook sheet names, table headings, or source caveats
• A transport or EV-transition analysis needs light-fleet fuel or powertrain counts
• Another tool already has a downloaded NZVehicleFleet_2024.xlsx workbook and needs JSON rows

Do Not Use This For

• Current individual-vehicle register rows; use NZTA open vehicle fleet data instead
• Real-time traffic, crash, charging-station, or public-transport operations data
• Registration mutation, licence checks, owner lookup, or authenticated Motor Vehicle Register access
• Hybrid/PHEV VKT allocation unless the workbook publishes that split directly

Preferred Workflow

1. Run scripts/cli.py datasets --json to inspect the official source pages, workbook-discovery status, release notes, and caveats.
2. Run tables --json to list workbook sheets and preview row/column headings when the workbook is reachable.
3. Use focused commands for common For Good transport questions:
   • vkt --year 2024 --json
   • fuel-counts --year 2024 --json
4. If the Ministry site blocks direct HTTP, download the public workbook in a browser and rerun with --url file:///absolute/path/NZVehicleFleet_2024.xlsx.
5. Keep source_url, fetched_at, table, sheet, and notes with any reported figures.

CLI

Run with:

python3 skills/mot-fleet-statistics-nz/scripts/cli.py <command> [flags]

Commands:

• datasets [--json] - report source pages, release notes, workbook discovery status, and caveats
• tables [--url URL] [--json] - list workbook sheets with preview headings and year coverage
• vkt --year YEAR [--url URL] [--json] - return rows from annual VKT/travel tables for the requested year
• fuel-counts --year YEAR [--url URL] [--json] - return light-fleet fuel or powertrain count rows for the requested year
• workbook --url URL [--sheet NAME] [--limit N] [--json] - parse a public XLSX workbook URL or local file:// workbook

Resources

• CLI entrypoint: scripts/cli.py
• Smoke test: scripts/smoke_test.py
• Source notes and table caveats: references/api-notes.md

Notes

• The CLI is read-only, keyless, and uses Python standard library modules only.
• XLSX workbooks are parsed with zipfile and xml.etree.ElementTree; no openpyxl dependency is required.
• The Ministry website can return Incapsula/bot-protection HTML to HTTP clients. Commands classify that as blocked and include the official source URL instead of treating the source as missing.
• The 2024 workbook publishes petrol, diesel, and pure-electric VKT tables; do not invent hybrid or PHEV VKT splits unless a future Ministry table publishes them.