Study of energy consumption improvement for electric vehicles in platoon driving

Abstract It is known that platoon driving has a large impact on fuel economy for conventional vehicles and using current available technologies, could be implemented especially on highway driving. Since the transition to electric vehicles is in progress, it is important to evaluate its applicability to this type of vehicles which have different characteristics than conventional ones equipped with an internal combustion engine. This paper aims to investigate the energy consumption improvement for a platoon of up to 7 electric passenger vehicles using a validated detailed model created in LMS Imagine. Lab AMESim, an industrial modelling and simulation environment. The energy consumption of individual vehicles and also the platoon’s will be calculated for several stabilized speeds and also on a standardized high-speed cycle (HWFET). The analysis will show how the special characteristics of an electric vehicle (lower drag coefficient, increased mass, regenerative braking, etc.) have an influence on the vehicle’s energy consumption when driving in a platoon. This will allow us to also evaluate the platoon driving efficacity in increasing the vehicle’s driving range.