Effect of Different Types of Electric Drive Units on the Energy Consumption of Heavy Commercial Electric Vehicles

The increasing demand for electric vehicles (EVs) in the transportation industry, especially for efficient battery–electric trucks, has led to an increase in studies on the efficiency or energy consumption of commercial vehicles. In this paper, average energy consumption was investigated in terms of the effect of different transmission types in vehicle models considering three routes, and the effect of the number of gears on energy consumption for each transmission type was analyzed. Target performance specifications and packaging were also evaluated. The optimal design could be identified in terms of transmission type, the number of gears, vehicle performance, and packaging. Vehicle models with two types of electric drive units (EDUs) were developed in a MATLAB/Simulink environment. Driving cycles were obtained from collected road load data of municipal, intercity, and regional areas operated by heavy-duty trucks using nCode software. The battery model was developed based on the electric circuit network (ECN) modeling technique. The main research purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of multispeed and multimodal EDUs and the number of gears on the energy consumption of heavy commercial electric vehicles from actual road conditions in Turkey. The three-speed EDU was the optimal design, providing 7.83, 7.26, and 7.21% less energy consumption on the three routes, compared with three-mode electric drive units. Consequently, the energy consumption difference was 7.5% for combined real road conditions.