The first thing you need to understand about Carv getcarv.com is that it is not there to flatter you.
This is unfortunate, because many skiers already have a fairly delicate relationship with the truth. We know how we think we ski. We know how we feel when we ski. We know the turn we are imagining in our head, the one where we are balanced, athletic, early on the edge, smooth through transition, and pressuring the outside ski like someone who has watched enough instructional videos to deserve improvement.
Then something records us.
A friend films us from the side of the run. A coach says something painfully accurate. A child skis past with better balance than seems reasonable.
Or Carv quietly informs us that the turn we believed was carved with elegance and precision was, in fact, a loose committee meeting between hope, heel pressure and mild panic.
That is a very particular kind of humiliation.
It is also, I have come to think, one of the more useful things a piece of technology can do to a skier.
Many skiers think they know what they are doing, and much of the time we are only partly right. I certainly thought I knew. In my head, my outside ski was loaded early, my edges came on cleanly, my transitions were smooth, and the whole thing had a kind of unhurried, slightly smug elegance that would surely have impressed anyone watching from the lift. Then Carv told me, calmly and without any interest in my feelings, that what I had just skied was not quite the masterpiece I had imagined.
Carv currently offers a 100-day Love It Guarantee and if it does not meet your expectations, return it within 100 days for a full refund.
My honest recommendation, is to skip the 6 day pass and go straight for the season pass. You can get a discount through my link here
Not because data is always right. Not because an app can replace a good instructor. Not because technology suddenly understands everything about snow, fear, timing, confidence, terrain, fatigue, ego, and the complicated private relationship between a skier and their own legs. It cannot do all that.
But what Carv can do is give ordinary skiers something many of us rarely get enough of: immediate, consistent, objective feedback. And that matters far more than people realise.
Before I go any further, it’s probably fair to explain why I’ve spent so much time thinking about this. I’ve been skiing for thirty years, I’m a qualified ski instructor in New Zealand and South Korea, I’ve completed postgraduate study in sports coaching, and for the past four seasons I’ve deliberately used Carv across Korea and New Zealand. I didn’t want to know whether it was interesting. I wanted to know whether it actually worked and how it can help people.
Carv is a ski sensor and coaching app. The current version, Carv 2, clips onto the power strap of each boot rather than sitting inside it, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Anyone who has spent time getting boots properly fitted knows how easily an extra insert can wreck the feel you have paid good money to get right. The sensors read what your feet and skis are doing while you ski, and the app turns that into scores, coaching cues and, if you want it, audio feedback telling you what to try on the next run.
For someone who has never used it before, that can sound like too much data. I understand that reaction. Skiing should not become a spreadsheet. Nobody falls in love with skiing because they want to stare at graphs on a phone. We fall in love with skiing because of snow, movement, speed, cold air, lift rides, family, rhythm, challenge, freedom, and that strange moment when a turn works and your body suddenly feels like it belongs in the mountains.
But better skiing gives you more of those moments. That is why the data matters. Not because the number is the point, but because better awareness changes how you ski. If Carv helps you understand that you are late to the edge, too far inside, too passive on the outside ski, not releasing cleanly, or relying too much on movements that feel familiar but do not actually help, then it gives you a direction. It gives you something to test on the next run. It gives you a way to keep learning when no instructor is standing beside you.
Experience covers for technical laziness extraordinarily well The 170 Project @ YouTube
The 170 Project takes its name from a Carv Ski IQ score, and people sometimes assume that means the whole thing is about chasing a number. It is not, or at least it stopped being that fairly early on. The number is the hook. What sits behind it is the actual value: being handed a language for your own skiing that is not simply “that felt good” or “that felt bad.”
Skiing has a cruel habit of hiding your plateau from you.
Experience covers for technical laziness extraordinarily well.
Confidence disguises imbalance. Speed disguises a turn that is being finished by momentum rather than by you. You can ski the same mediocre habits for ten years, get faster and more comfortable doing it, and call the result style.
I know this because I did it for a while, and Carv is what told me. One run, early in my second season with it, I was convinced I had just laid down the best turns of the day. Big, round, confident. The kind of skiing you want someone on the chairlift behind you to have seen. The score came back lower than a run I barely remembered ten minutes earlier, one where I had been tentative and a little tight, trying to fix something specific rather than just skiing hard. The tentative run had better edge timing and a cleaner release.
The confident run was mostly commitment dressed up as technique.
That is an uncomfortable thing to be told by an app. It is a more uncomfortable thing to realise it is right.
None of this makes Carv some kind of oracle, and I think skiers get into trouble the moment they start treating it like one. It is a model. It measures what it can measure, and it has assumptions built into what “good” looks like, the same as any coach does. The newer Ski:IQ system, called Nevado, at least tries to account for this more intelligently, weighting scores by ability level, pitch and snow surface rather than judging every skier in every condition as if they were solving exactly the same problem.
That is a meaningfully better approach than a blunt one-size-fits-all number, but it is still a judgement, not a law. If the score says something that does not match what you felt, the right response is to test it, not obey it. Watch the clip. Try the movement again. Ask an instructor. Argue with it, the way I have on many chairlifts, and sometimes win.
That last part matters to me, because I do not think Carv replaces coaching, and I would be suspicious of anyone who says it does. A good instructor watches your whole body, reads your fear, adjusts the task to the person standing in front of them, sees the terrain, understands the conditions, and does all of this while also, somehow, being pleasant company on a freezing morning. No sensor clipped to a boot strap can do any of that.
What it can do is be there on every single run of every single day, including the eleven runs after the lesson has finished and you are back to skiing alone with only your own memory of what the instructor said an hour ago. That gap, between the lesson and the next lesson, is where many of us actually plateau. It is exactly the gap Carv is built to sit inside.
It matters more here than it might somewhere else, too. Ski lessons are not cheap, and by the time you have paid for a pass, petrol, gear, food and possibly children, another lesson can feel like the one cost too many. So people just ski. They get better for a season or two and then quietly stop, and call the resulting habits their style, the same as I did.
Carv does not fix that on its own, but it gives you something to work with in all the hours a coach is not standing next to you, which in New Zealand is most of them. This is probably why I think it suits New Zealand skiing so well. New Zealand does not really do you the courtesy of consistent conditions. One run is grippy, the next is scraped back to something the snow report calls firm, in the diplomatic sense of the word. The light goes flat. The wind decides an opinion about your afternoon. The mountain changes its mind. The surface changes. Your confidence changes with it.
On a day like that, without something to focus on, you are mostly just surviving until the café opens. With Carv running, a flat, ordinary, forgettable ski day becomes an experiment. Work on getting to the outside ski earlier. Check whether your left and right turns actually mirror each other, which mine, it turns out, do not. Find out whether the change you think you made this morning actually showed up in the data by lunch. Try one run focusing on edge timing. Try another focusing on balance. Try another where you stop trying to ski impressively and instead ski precisely, which is much less glamorous and far more useful.
That reframing is worth more to me than the score ever was. It is the difference between a mediocre day being wasted and a mediocre day being spent on something.
This is also why I think Carv is useful for skiers who are not necessarily racers, experts, or technology people. You do not need to be obsessed with data to benefit from feedback. You just need to be curious enough to ask whether what you feel under your feet is actually what is happening.
Many skiers have had the experience of taking a lesson, understanding the idea perfectly while standing still, nodding intelligently, skiing away, and then immediately returning to the same old movement pattern the moment the slope gets steeper, the snow gets harder, or the body decides it would rather survive than learn. Carv does not stop that happening. But it does make it harder to ignore.
You ski. It responds. You try again. Sometimes the number improves. Sometimes it drops and you invent a series of entirely reasonable explanations involving snow texture, visibility, wind, fatigue, other skiers, equipment, and the general unfairness of modern life. Sometimes you are right. Sometimes you are not. But either way, you are paying attention.
Most ski improvement happens too slowly to notice. You take a lesson. You receive advice. You understand some of it. You misunderstand some of it. You go away for lunch. You forget the one thing you were meant to focus on.
You ski three more runs, get tired, start defending old habits, and by the end of the day you are mostly thinking about boots, weather, coffee, and whether the snow has become what New Zealanders politely call “character-building.”
Carv changes that rhythm. It gives you something to work on immediately. Not at the end of the week. Not after someone finally sends you the video. Not when you vaguely remember what the instructor said two chairlifts ago. Immediately. You ski a run, look at the feedback, listen to the coaching, and then go back up with a clearer idea of what to try next.
Sometimes that idea is simple. Sometimes it is humbling. Sometimes it confirms what you already suspected but did not want officially measured by a device attached to your boots.
This is both the joy and danger of Carv. It gives numbers to things that used to remain safely vague. Ski IQ, edge angles, balance, pressure, outside ski performance, parallel skis, turn shape, and all the other little measurements and summaries begin to create a picture of how you are moving.
Some people love this immediately. They want the score. They want the graph. They want proof that the last run was better than the one before.
Other people feel suspicious of it. Fair enough. A perfect day on snow cannot be reduced to a number. Some of the best turns in your life may happen in terrible visibility, on strange snow, when you are not thinking about metrics at all. A ski app cannot know everything about what the mountain is asking of you. It cannot fully understand why a cautious skier is cautious, why a tired skier is defensive, or why a technically messy turn might still feel like freedom.
Carv does not need to understand your soul. It just needs to show you something useful.
Ironically, Carv has actually made me value skilled instructors more, not less. The better I understand my own skiing, the more I appreciate what other experienced instructors notice that no sensor ever could.
A word on the audio coaching, because it is the one feature people ask me about most. Not everyone loves having a voice in their ear mid-run telling them what to try next, and that is a fair reaction. The good news is it is entirely optional and adjustable, you are in full control of how much, or how little, the app talks to you. It may not be for everyone. But the underlying feedback loop can help almost any skier improve, whether you take it through audio, the app afterwards, or both. A few people I have shared Carv with tried it for only a couple of days and came away saying the data alone was amazing and genuinely helpful.
On the practical side, since this is meant to be a review and not just an essay: Carv now runs as an annual membership rather than a one-off purchase. There’s a 6-day pass if you just want to try it without committing, or a season pass, which works out to roughly USD $250 a year, sensors included. Yes, it is another subscription in a world already thick with them, and I understand the fatigue. But set against the cost of lift passes, travel, gear and lessons, it is genuinely good value for what it gives you.
Setup is close to plug-and-play. Take the sensors out of the box, install the app, pair them with your phone, and you are ready to ski, the whole thing takes a couple of minutes, and it works seamlessly whether you are on Android or iPhone. Battery life has been excellent; I typically get around five days of skiing before needing to charge. Over four seasons I have had no dropouts, no syncing issues, and no problems with the sensors slipping or coming loose.
There is also, as far as I am aware, nothing else on the market that comes close to doing what Carv does. The honest alternative is asking your mate to stand at the bottom of the run and tell you how your skiing looked. You’ll either get genuinely useful technical feedback, or a cheerful “Yeah, looked good,” depending on whether they were actually watching.
One more thing worth mentioning: I am part of Carv’s First Tracks group, which gives a number of users early access to versions still in development. There is no payment or product involved, just early access, and I cannot share specifics of what is coming. However, being part of it has actually increased my confidence in recommending Carv, because I have seen firsthand how actively the team listens to feedback and keeps refining and improving it.
None of this makes Carv some kind of oracle, and none of it makes skiing into a spreadsheet. The best part of skiing is still the mountain. The cold air. The snow. The lift rides. The light. The feeling of one turn working properly. The strange private joy of movement. The moment when your skis bend, the edge holds, and your body finally stops arguing with gravity. No app can replace that.
But a good tool can help you find it more often. A little more awareness. A little more focus. A little more honesty. And perhaps, if you are patient, a few more of those turns where everything briefly makes sense.
So if you have been curious about Carv but have not quite committed, here is the honest version after four seasons of arguing with it on chairlifts. It will not make you a better skier by itself. It will not replace a good instructor, and it will occasionally tell you something you are certain is wrong, right up until the moment you watch the video back and discover it was not.
What it will do is give you consistent, unglamorous, slightly uncomfortable feedback, every run (anywhere on the mountain, not just groomers), on every kind of day New Zealand is willing to give you.
It has not made my skiing perfect. It has made it honest, which turns out to matter a great deal more. The funny thing is, the biggest change wasn’t my Ski IQ. It was the way I actually ski. I’ll write about that in my next post.
Review note
We are not sponsored or supported by Carv. Carv has not sponsored this article.
They did not send me the sensors, pay for the subscription, review this post, or ask me to say anything nice about the product.
I am a member of Carv’s First Tracks group, which gives early access to versions still under development. This comes with no payment, free product, or editorial input from Carv, only early access.
Carv was paid for by NZiSki and the 170 Project, to test and understand it deeply, and work out whether it was something I could genuinely recommend to other skiers.
These are my own views after four seasons of using it, testing it, arguing with the data, and trying to understand what it can and cannot do for ordinary skiers who want to improve.
Carv currently offers a 100-day Love It Guarantee, buy it, use it properly, and if it does not meet your expectations, return it within 100 days for a full refund.
My honest recommendation, having used it for four seasons, is to skip the short trial pass and go straight for the season pass. You can get a discount through my link here.