Acceleration, Drive Cycle Efficiency, and Cost Tradeoffs for Scaled Electric Vehicle Drive System

This article investigates and quantifies, for varying drive system ratings (0.5-2.0 times the rating of a small and large reference system), the tradeoff relations between the electric vehicle acceleration performance and energy consumption during a wide range of drive cycles, using detailed load-dependent loss models. Additionally, the results are related to estimated drive system cost by transparently determined scalable electric motor and inverter cost models. When reducing the system rating to half, the cost is 83% of the small reference system and 76% of the large. The acceleration time (0-100 km/h) decreases nonlinearly with increasing system rating. Interestingly, the drive cycle energy consumption generally decreases with decreasing drive system rating, and most cycles show a minimum consumption with a downscaled drive system. For the small system, the strongest impact was noted for the HWFET cycle where the energy consumption is reduced 2% when downscaling the drive system by 0.5 relative to the reference system. For the large system, NYCC shows the largest reduction in energy consumption: 4% when scaled by 1.6 relative to the reference system.