Performance of Motor Vehicle based on Driving and Vehicle Data using Machine Learning

With the increasing population demographics and the dependency of man on motor vehicles as the primary source of transportation, the number of motor vehicles being registered for commercial as well as non-commercial activities on a daily basis is massive and yet continues to increase at an alarming rate. This has a direct and an unambiguous effect on the amount of fossil fuels being utilized globally and its subsequent environmental effects, which is of great concern in the present situation. Several attempts from various research sectors are ongoing in order to overcome this global issue and promising results are expected. This project is one such attempt at identifying the performance of small passenger cars in terms of fuel efficiency and map them with factors affecting it using machine learning techniques. The commencing activity while carrying out any such research activity will be the identification of the problem and all its possible sources. In this case, two potential sources can be identified and they are; the vehicle characteristics and the driver/driving behaviour. The relevant data for this analysis was taken from the public source, Kaggle which is the data collected from the OBD of the car and models are built using techniques like Multiple Linear Regression, XGBoost, Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural Network and their performance is compared to discover the first-rate technique in predicting the fuel efficiency and to propose the optimum driving behaviour in terms of throttle position to achieve better fuel efficiency. The results reveal that XGBoost model outperforms all other models developed in predicting the fuel efficiency for the different split ratios evaluated and comparing the throttle position with the predicted fuel efficiency explains that to achieve better fuel efficiency the throttle position must be around 70 to 80 on a scale of 100, referred to as full throttle position. The knowledge discovered from the research could be used by car manufacturers to design cars in future to mitigate the fuel consumption