Normalized Evaluation of Fuel Economy for Electric Oriented Commercial Vehicles

The fuel economy regulation has been applied to cars and light trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) of 8,500 pounds or less for decades. For the first time, the government is also beginning to work on national mileage standards beyond the existing emission regulation for big rigs and work trucks (i.e., commercial vehicles). This effort will lead to limiting the disproportionate share of pollutions from these large vehicles. The same technology trend for both currently regulated vehicles and those unregulated big trucks is electrification for better energy efficiency. Vehicle electrification will be widely employed to improve energy utilization efficiency, and reduce or even eliminate GHG emissions. Overall the fundamental objective is to reduce the total amount of energy used by vehicles while minimizing the negative environmental impacts overall. Thus, it is critically important to find out an effective and implementable matrix that can be acceptable and recognizable for both industry and public. In this paper, the weight ratio between payload and unloaded vehicle weight is introduced to normalize the conventional mpg to evaluate vehicle performance per duty cycles. This methodology is especially suited to new energy vehicles by using both endogenous fuel and exogenous electricity (if applicable).