Understanding Battery Degradation Phenomenon in Real-Life Electric Vehicle Use Based on Big Data

As the rapid development of Electric Vehicles (EV), battery aging phenomenon becomes an emerging and challenging question to EV communities. However, battery degradation in real-life EV use has been discussed little. In this paper, by analyzing a large scale electric taxi GPS and deal data, we make the first attempt to investigate this problem. A case in Shenzhen is analyzed in this paper, where BYD e6 is used as the EV taxi type, offering us a real situation. Since data of battery management system (BMS) is not open in public, a new concept of travelled distance between two consecutive recharging events (TDC) is proposed to describe battery capacity loss. By utilizing historical TDC values of EV taxis, a statistic analysis method based on box-plot is proposed to understand battery aging. To evaluate battery performance and degradation in real-life EV use, we conduct experiments on nearly 4 years real EV taxi GPS data. The evaluation results demonstrate that external circumstances, such as temperature, road condition and charging rate, will have an impact on battery degradation in real-life EV use while the overall battery aging trend will be affected little.