Experimental Research of Transmissions on Electric Vehicles’ Energy Consumption

Abstract

The growth of electric vehicles share of total passenger-vehicle sales is evident and is expected to be a very big market segment by 2030. Range of travel and pricing are the most influencing factors that affect their gain in market share. As so, powertrain development is a key technology factor researched by the automotive industry. To explore, among others, how the energy consumption of zero emission vehicles is affected by different transmissions, we developed, built and installed a variety of them on a custom hydrogen fuel cell powered urban vehicle. In this work we present a comparison of the effect, on the energy consumption of the proposed testbed, of a prototype custom build 2-speed gearbox and a single stage transmission. Results presented show a reduction of the overall energy consumption with the use of the 2-speed gearbox, compared to single stage, as well as the effect of gear change speed, related to speed, in energy consumption. Finally, a correlation of experimental results using a custom build CVT is conducted compared to single stage transmission. A comparison to simulation results found in literature is performed for all the transmissions tested on road.