Impact factors of the real-world fuel consumption rate of light duty vehicles in China

Abstract Measuring real-world fuel consumption of light duty vehicles can be challenging due to the limited collection of actual data. In this paper, we use big data retrieved from the record of real-world fuel consumptions of different brands of vehicles in different areas (n = 106,809 samples from 201 brands of vehicles and 34 cities) in China to build up a real-world fuel consumption rate (RFCR) model to estimate the fuel consumption given the driving conditions and figure out the main factors that affect actual fuel consumption under real world operation. We find the average deviation of actual fuel consumptions and the fitting results of RFCR model is 4.22% and does not significantly differ from zero, and the fuel consumptions calculated by RFCR model tend to be 1.40 L/100 km (about 25%) higher than the official reported values. Furthermore, we find that annual average temperature and altitude factors significantly influence the fuel consumption rate. The results indicate that there is a real world performance discrepancy between the theoretical fuel consumption released by authorities and that in the real world, and some green behaviors (choose light duty vehicles, reduce use of air conditioning and change to manual transmission type) can reduce energy consumption of vehicles.