Overview
The number of plug-in and electric vehicle models in the medium-duty (MD) and heavy-duty (HD) category has significantly expanded in recent years. Along with that, a growing number of fleets are deploying or are interested in deploying electric vehicles such as transit buses, school buses, trucks, and off-road equipment. With this rapid growth of electric vehicles in the market, reliable operation and performance data on electric MD and HD vehicles is needed to provide insights on usage and to support the ongoing research into the future deployment. The focus of this project is to collect operations and performance data on MD and HD electric vehicles primarily and much smaller subset of LD electric vehicles. The project will build on deployment efforts underway in several regions across the country that include: a) electric transit buses (transit properties in NY, IL, UT, and CA), b) electric school buses (school districts in NY and CA), c) electric trucks (several large projecs involving truck fleets and goods movement operations in CA), d) electric off-road equipment (ports, goods movement facilities in CA), e) EVs for clean mobility solutions or workplace. The data will be collected using on-board data loggers and established data collection protocols, based on extensive experience of the project team. Several different types of data loggers may be used. CALSTART and CE-CERT have a large number of data loggers that we have been using on vehicle data colleciton projects and that will be available to be used in this project. Other data loggers will may be pre-installed by the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), or provided by a third-party telematics provider as selected by the fleet. We will also seek participation from the OEMs to insure that data can be successfully captured from each vehicle. Data collection test plans and protocols will be standardized, as much as possible, to ensure uniformity across the projects. Data will include: 1) vehicle performance data , 2) charging data from off-board chargers, 3) electricity consumption data, 4) other facility data, and 5) climate data. These data will be collected in addition to vehicle desciption data such as make, model, year, and battery capacity. Data will be collected over a period of at least 12 months from the individual projects and stored centrally in CALSTART’s and/or CE-CERT’s secured data servers. The data will be verified, cleaned, anonymized, and analyzed using clearly defined steps and uniform processes across all vehicles. We will collaborate with colleagues at NREL to inform the definitions of parameters and format of the raw data and ensure alignment with existing database requirements before providing it to the designated Department of Energy natinal lab. Analyses will be peformed to provide summarized results, including tables, charts, and other visuals. All data collected through this project will be made available for download via FTP or similar protocol and accessible only to those who are provided access.
Lead Researcher: Dr. Kent Johnson Co-researchers: Dr. Kanok Booriboonsomsin, Dr. Thomas Durbin