Comparative evaluation of energy efficiency of electrical vehicle powertrain configurations

The paper presents a simulative investigation of the performance provided by different powertrain configurations of road vehicles. This comparison involves factors such as energy consumption of the vehicle, energy losses in the powertrain’s components, vehicle handling and vehicle’s robustness against lateral disturbances. As reference vehicle for all investigations, the electro-mobility research platform ROboMObil (ROMO) from the German Aerospace Center is considered. Based on this platform, different powertrain variants such as rear-wheel-drive – either with in-wheel motors or torque vectoring devices – or all-wheel-drive and all-wheel steering cars (which is based on the ROMO vehicle) were investigated. For these computer aided investigations, all vehicles were modelled in the programming language Modelica. Subsequently, energy efficiency and vehicle handling performance metrics for several driving manoeuvres, obtained through the simulation of the various vehicle configurations, are presented and discussed.