Electric vehicles’ energy consumption measurement and estimation

Use of electric vehicles (EVs) has been viewed by many as a way to significantly reduce oil dependence, operate vehicles more efficiently, and reduce carbon emissions. Due to the potential benefits of EVs, the federal and local governments have allocated considerable funding and taken a number of legislative and regulatory steps to promote EV deployment and adoption. With this momentum, it is not difficult to see that in the near future EVs could gain a significant market penetration, particularly in densely populated urban areas with systemic air quality problems. We will soon face one of the biggest challenges: how to improve efficiency for EV transportation system? This research takes the first step in tackling this challenge by addressing a fundamental issue, i.e. how to measure and estimate EVs’ energy consumption. In detail, this paper first presents a system which can collect in-use EV data and vehicle driving data. This system then has been installed in an EV conversion vehicle built in this research as a test vehicle. Approximately 5 months of EV data have been collected and these data have been used to analyze both EV performance and driver behaviors. The analysis shows that the EV is more efficient when driving on in-city routes than driving on freeway routes. Further investigation of this particular EV driver’s route choice behavior indicates that the EV user tries to balance the trade-off between travel time and energy consumption. Although more data are needed in order to generalize this finding, this observation could be important and might bring changes to the traffic assignment for future transportation system with a significant share of EVs. Additionally, this research analyzes the relationships among the EV’s power, the vehicle’s velocity, acceleration, and the roadway grade. Based on the analysis results, this paper further proposes an analytical EV power estimation model. The evaluation results using the test vehicle show that the proposed model can successfully estimate EV’s instantaneous power and trip energy consumption. Future research will focus on applying the proposed EV power estimation model to improve EVs’ energy efficiency.