Prospects of electric vehicles in the developing countries : a literature review

Electric mobility offers a low cost of travel along with energy and harmful emissions savings. Nevertheless, a comprehensive literature review is missing for the prospects of electric vehicles in developing countries. Such an overview would be instrumental for policymakers to understand the barriers and opportunities related to different types of electric vehicles (EVs). Considering the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines, a systematic review was performed of the electronic databases Google Scholar and Web of Science for the years 2010–2020. The electric four-wheelers, hybrid electric vehicles and electric two-wheeler constituted the electric vehicles searched in the databases. Initially, 35 studies identified in the Web of Science that matched the criteria were studied. Later, 105 other relevant reports and articles related to barriers and opportunities were found by using Google Scholar and studied. Results reveal that electric four-wheelers are not a feasible option in developing countries due to their high purchase price. On the contrary, electric two-wheelers may be beneficial as they come with a lower purchase price

Charging ahead on the transition to electric vehicles with standard 120 v wall outlets

Electrification of transportation is needed soon and at significant scale to meet climate goals, but electric vehicle adoption has been slow and there has been little systematic analysis to show that today's electric vehicles meet the needs of drivers. We apply detailed physics-based models of electric vehicles with data on how drivers use their cars on a daily basis. We show that the energy storage limits of today's electric vehicles are outweighed by their high efficiency and the fact that driving in the United States seldom exceeds 100 km of daily travel. When accounting for these factors, we show that the normal daily travel of 85-89% of drivers in the United States can be satisfied with electric vehicles charging with standard 120 V wall outlets at home only. Further, we show that 77-79% of drivers on their normal daily driving will have over 60 km of buffer range for unexpected trips. We quantify the sensitivities to terrain, high ancillary power draw, and battery degradation and show that an extreme case with all trips on a 3% uphill grade still shows the daily travel of 70% of drivers being satisfied with electric vehicles. These findings show that today's electric vehicles can satisfy the daily driving needs of a significant majority of drivers using only 120 V wall outlets that are already the standard across the United States

Plug-In Electric Vehicles

Did you know?Using electricity to power an automotive vehicle would cost the equivalent of paying less than $2.00 per gallon of gasoline at current electric prices. In some states, the cost would be under$1.00 per gallon.A typical mid-size sedan, when running on electricity from the current U.S. grid, would have the same carbon footprint as a car that gets 50 miles per gallon (mpg) of gasoline. As more electricity comes from renewable sources, net carbon emissions would be reduced further. Plug-in electric vehicles could be on the market very soon

On M2M Micropayments : A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs)

Forecasting the state of health of electric vehicle batteries to evaluate the viability of car sharing practices

Car sharing practices are introducing electric vehicles into their fleet. However, literature suggests that at this point shared electric vehicle systems are failing to reach satisfactory commercial viability. Potential reason for this is the effect of higher vehicle usage which is characteristic for car sharing, and the implication on the battery state of health. In this paper, we forecast state of health for two identical electric vehicles shared by two different car sharing practices. For this purpose, we use real life transaction data from charging stations and different electric vehicles’ sensors. The results indicate that insight into users’ driving and charging behaviour can provide valuable point of reference for car sharing system designers. In particular, the forecasting results show that the moment when electric vehicle battery reaches its theoretical end of life can differ in as much as ¼ of time when vehicles are shared under different conditions

Light and ultralight electric vehicles

Today electrical vehicles are again considered seriously. However, one is not yet used to their performance. An overview is given in what one can expect from electric vehicles, ranging from electric bicycles to the electrical SUV. Special attention is given to the possibility of ultralight electric cars and the elbev concept, “Ecologic Low Budget Electric Vehicle”. Together with high efficiency power plants, a CO2 emissions of about 10gr/km could be obtained

Optimal Decentralized Protocols for Electric Vehicle Charging

We propose decentralized algorithms for optimally scheduling electric vehicle charging. The algorithms exploit the elasticity and controllability of electric vehicle related loads in order to fill the valleys in electric demand profile. We formulate a global optimization problem whose objective is to impose a generalized notion of valley-filling, study properties of the optimal charging profiles, and give decentralized offline and online algorithms to solve the problem. In each iteration of the proposed algorithms, electric vehicles choose their own charging profiles for the rest horizon according to the price profile broadcast by the utility, and the utility updates the price profile to guide their behavior. The offline algorithms are guaranteed to converge to optimal charging profiles irrespective of the specifications (e.g., maximum charging rate and deadline) of electric vehicles at the expense of a restrictive assumption that all electric vehicles are available for negotiation at the beginning of the planning horizon. The online algorithms relax this assumption by using a scalar prediction of future total charging demand at each time instance and yield near optimal charging profiles. The proposed algorithms need no coordination among the electric vehicles, hence their implementation requires low communication and computation capability. Simulation results are provided to support these results

Using mobility information to perform a feasibility study and the evaluation of spatio-temporal energy demanded by an electric taxi fleet

Half of the global population already lives in urban areas, facing to the problem of air pollution mainly caused by the transportation system. The recently worsening of urban air quality has a direct impact on the human health. Replacing today’s internal combustion engine vehicles with electric ones in public fleets could provide a deep impact on the air quality in the cities. In this paper, real mobility information is used as decision support for the taxi fleet manager to promote the adoption of electric taxi cabs in the city of San Francisco, USA. Firstly, mobility characteristics and energy requirements of a single taxi are analyzed. Then, the results are generalized to all vehicles from the taxi fleet. An electrificability rate of the taxi fleet is generated, providing information about the number of current trips that could be performed by electric taxis without modifying the current driver mobility patterns. The analysis results reveal that 75.2% of the current taxis could be replaced by electric vehicles, considering a current standard battery capacity (24–30 kWh). This value can increase significantly (to 100%), taking into account the evolution of the price and capacity of the batteries installed in the last models of electric vehicles that are coming to the market. The economic analysis shows that the purchasing costs of an electric taxi are bigger than conventional one. However, fuel, maintenance and repair costs are much lower. Using the expected energy consumption information evaluated in this study, the total spatio-temporal demand of electric energy required to recharge the electric fleet is also calculated, allowing identifying optimal location of charging infrastructure based on realistic routing patterns. This information could also be used by the distribution system operator to identify possible reinforcement actions in the electric grid in order to promote introducing electric vehicles

Transport energy consumption in mountainous roads. A comparative case study for internal combustion engines and electric vehicles in Andorra

This paper analyses transport energy consumption of conventional and electric vehicles in mountainous roads. A standard round trip in Andorra has been modelled in order to characterise vehicle dynamics in hilly regions. Two conventional diesel vehicles and their electric-equivalent models have been simulated and their performances have been compared. Six scenarios have been simulated to study the effects of factors such as orography, traffic congestion and driving style. The European fuel consumption and emissions test and Artemis urban driving cycles, representative of European driving cycles, have also been included in the comparative analysis. The results show that road grade has a major impact on fuel economy, although it affects consumption in different levels depending on the technology analysed. Electric vehicles are less affected by this factor as opposed to conventional vehicles, increasing the potential energy savings in a hypothetical electrification of the car fleet. However, electric vehicle range in mountainous terrains is lower compared to that estimated by manufacturers, a fact that could adversely affect a massive adoption of electric cars in the short term.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft