Research Article

Micromobility and smart cities: efficiency, energy consumption and range analysis for electric vehicles

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

^* e-mail: desiree.alcazar@upc.edu

Received: 24 July 2021
Received in final form: 7 November 2021
Accepted: 10 November 2021

Abstract

Climate change and smart cities are topics where a large number of resources are being invested to avoid it and advance its development respectively. This paper presents a calculation procedure of the car efficiency, energy consumption and range whose efficiency has already been tested for hybrid vehicles (including plug-in) and fuel cell vehicles, as well as pure electric vehicles of category M₁. This method has been adapted for quadricycles of category L6e and L7e in order to be able to use it to accelerate the design of this type of vehicles and contribute to its introduction in Smart Cities. The reliability of the system has been verified with commercially available vehicles and prototypes taking into account their technical specifications: electric motor (e.g., permanent magnet motor), technology of energy storage system (e.g., lithium-ion battery), weight and geometry of the car for all types of drive cycles. According to the literature review, there is currently no standardized operating system or hardware abstraction layer for such methodology/application in the automotive sector. This flexible method can be easily extended for different technologies of batteries and electric motors, different standard or customized drive cycles, etc. Besides, it has high reliability for vehicles of category L since in no case does the error reach 5 % and the average value is 2.5 % when real data from vehicle manufacturers and outcomes are compared. Thus, results show the consistency of the system.