Overview
Electric mobility poses one of the key topics in automotive industry for reducing the vehicle fleet fuel consumption. However, the achievable market penetration depends on several, currently intensively discussed factors. Aside from high purchase costs of xEVs (vehicles with drivetrain electrification), limitations in comfort represent an important aspect. Except for high-class vehicles, the customer still associates xEVs with significant cutbacks in comfort.
Frequent and impractical charging procedures with heavy charging cables as well as significant driving range losses in case of using heating and air conditioning systems need to be accepted. Apart from that, the integration of electric components into the drivetrain largely influences the vehicle's characteristics, providing the customer with an unfamiliar driving experience.
Driving comfort relevant aspects like response behaviour, gear change characteristics, noise emission, acceleration and regenerative braking behaviour are changed. Typically implemented operation strategies do not take these drivability aspects into account. In order to enhance the attractiveness of xEVs and subsequently increase the market penetration these obstacles need to be removed. This structured approach for creating additional customer value as proposed in this project allows generating USPs, increasing the sales figures of xEVs and improving the competitiveness of both industry and academia within the present complex of themes.
This project aims at significantly shortening the charging times of xEVs, reducing excess energy consumption resulting from the usage of air conditioning and heating, and extension of the operation strategy for including drivability aspects within real driving situations. A dedicated project structure can be seen in illustration 1. The first of three work packages deals with comfort aspects during recharging and covers robotic charging, wireless charging and high power charging. In work package 2, the energy consumption reduction and driving range increase resulting from intelligently-coupled heating and cooling systems with a heat pump, is examined. Moreover, other technologies for reducing the energy consumption are analysed and compared. Work package 3 focuses on drivability optimization of xEVs under real driving conditions. After a method development phase and an influence analysis, a vehicle simulation model will be created. Finally, this model will be validated with an existing xEV.