The impact of drivers’ acceleration style on the vehicle energy performance: a real-world case study.

The present study investigates the impact of different acceleration styles collected from a sample of human drivers on the vehicle's energy performance in real-world trips. The variations in CO 2 emissions according to different acceleration patterns are benchmarked to real-world trips from a driving campaign that involved 20 drivers on the same reference vehicle. The paper builds on a previous work that benchmarked the correlation between CO 2 emissions and acceleration behaviour to the standard homologation Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Cycle (WLTC). The current work extends the application to real-world conditions, modifying the acceleration events of real-world trips according to the driver's acceleration attitude and subsequently simulating the energy performance, specifically the CO 2 emissions. The heterogeneity of the driver's acceleration style is characterised by the vehicle-Independent Driving Style metric (IDS), which represents the driver's acceleration aggressiveness. The results confirm a significant impact in CO 2 emissions of the acceleration behaviour, leading to differences above 10% between the most timid (IDS=0.05) and most dynamic styles (IDS=1) when a consistent acceleration style is followed for the whole trip, in contrast with the 5% difference found when benchmarking to the WLTC cycle. The impact is substantially reduced (± 1 CO 2 g/km) when considering the stochasticity of the human acceleration style.