Battery Electric Vehicle Lightweighting Strategies: Addressing Energy Consumption and Range Anxiety

In general, an internal combustion engine vehicle is still the convention in personal and commercial transport, but due to its high use stage CO2 emission, a shift is occurring in propulsion methods, and the use of battery electric vehicles (BEV) will become the new norm. BEV’s curb weight is, in general, greater than that of a conventional fuelled vehicle (CFV) for equivalent classes. Consequently, it is questionable that the level of BEV’s energy consumption is acceptable. The aim of this paper is to compare the mass induced energy consumption of CFV and BEV. The expectation is that the comparative study of energy consumption between CFV and BEV will provide insight for proposing a strategy to determine the extent to which lightweighting can be introduced to a BEV. Encouragingly, less exhaustive energy consumption can help by reducing range anxiety by increasing BEV range, resolving one issue facing a BEV. With a typical road condition for hilly and flat roads, various drive cycles are also taken into consideration, and the energy consumption profiles for CFV and BEV can be determined. The vehicle model involved using the MATLAB/Simulink software underpinned by longitudinal vehicle dynamic methods. The idea is to determine the amount of lightweighting of various components of a BEV through an iterative process based on energy consumption profiles. As a function of mass reduction, for comparative energy expenditure, the results showed that a range of 28 to 36% reduction in BEV mass was achieved, which in turn can increase the driving range by 36.4 to 46.8%.