The project eFahrung aims for the development and evaluation of business models for the integration of electric vehicles into corporate vehicle fleets. The key issues of these investigations will be cost-effectiveness, reliability and general attractiveness as these are the decisive criteria according to which vehicles are assessed in corporate car pools. In order to make them a serious option in the future electric vehicles need to compete with conventional vehicles at these criteria.

A detailed view on these criteria

Cost-Effectiveness: The total costs of ownership for the operation of an electric vehicle must be competitive to conventional vehicles in the vehicle fleet. The shared use across several vehicle fleets helps to improve the cost-effectiveness by an increased utilization of the vehicles.

Reliability: The current limitations of electric vehicles – especially concerning the battery technology – are being tracked, investigated and compensated by service offers in order to guarantee the satisfaction of the mobility needs of the vehicle operator.

Attractiveness: Many fleet operators would like to try out the adoption of electric vehicles if they were not deterred by the aforementioned issues. The joint use and a mutual exchange of experience with other fleet operators is intended to establish familiarity and thereby increase the acceptance for the integration of electric vehicles into corporate vehicle fleets. The cooperative structure is intended to help spreading gained insights and gathered experience broadly.

The contribution of the DFKI RIC is to provide the necessary technology and experience for the monitoring of electric vehicles as part of vehicle fleets and the continuous processing and analysis of high volume data streams (big data). As well as the in-house developed intelligent On-Board Unit (iOBU), which transmits the vehicles’ operational parameters to the back-end system in real-time.