Evaluating the Urban Electric Vehicle

The underlying goal of the ChargeCar project is to examine the common urban commute and to determine if cars powered by managed supercapacitor-battery systems are a solution that can reduce cost of ownership for a commuter car. This is not through the development of new component technologies but by better understanding of real urban commutes and by using existing, affordable technology more intelligently.

In this paper we present power data from real-world commutes using a 2002 Rav-4 EV electric vehicle with regenerative braking. We then model the expected effects of adding an intelligently managed supercapacitor to the energy storage system.