Modeling energy consumption for battery electric vehicles based on in-use vehicle trajectories

The development of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) raises a demand to develop a tool to estimate and predict their energy consumption accurately and efficiently. This study proposes a model to estimate the energy consumption of BEVs based on the trajectories of in-use vehicles, including both BEVs and internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). This model consists of three modules: vehicle specific power (VSP) distributions, energy consumption rates, travel time and mileages. The estimation results are validated and compared with those derived from driving cycles and instantaneous speeds. It is found that the VSP distributions can capture the variation of the energy consumption relating to average speeds, and the results are unbiased with average errors less than 1.9%, comparing with instantaneous speeds. It is practicable to employ the trajectories of ICEVs to model the activity of BEVs for energy consumption estimates, and the average errors are less than 2.7%.