Environmental considerations mean that continuing to use internal combustion is, in the long term, unviable because of availability and cost of the fuel and the environmental effects of their emissions. If full electric vehicles (EVs) are to be a more sustainable method of transport then some of the perceived problems of EVs must be addressed, such as ‘range anxiety’ and ‘technical performance’. To do this it is necessary to understand how drivers behave in EVs, both through their overall trip statistics and their driving behaviour within trips. This has been achieved in this project through instrumenting the EVs with a direct link to the vehicle's controller area network bus, a global positioning system and a networked link to an always on database. Through analysis of the vehicle data, it has been possible to build up a quantitative picture of how the vehicles are typically used. Quantitative examples include trip lengths, trip efficiency correlated to the braking techniques and general driving behaviour changes such as improved efficiency at low battery levels. From this study it can be shown that it is possible to monitor EVs and selectively produce derived statistics which can be used to analyse the behaviour of drivers.

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How does the use of a continuously updating database allow for the analysis of a user's changing behaviour in electric vehicles?

References

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