Engineering news
Researchers from the US Department of Energy and the University of California, Berkeley collected data from more than 10 million taxi trips in New York City, and built a model of how such a system might work in the future.
They found that shared automated electric vehicles would be able to carry out the same number of journeys at a significantly lower cost, with reduced emissions and energy consumption. They also found that ‘range anxiety’ – one of the big problems with electric vehicles – would not be an issue, although more charging stations would be needed.
“The EV industry is focusing on the personal car market, trying to make the range as large as possible,” said Jeffery Greenblatt, one of the authors of the study. “The standard is now 200 miles. We suspected you wouldn’t need as much for taxis. We found plenty of times during the day when a portion of taxis could slip off to recharge, even if just for a few minutes.”
Batteries account for much of the weight of electric cars, but Greenblatt said that more frequent charging and short trips could reduce the need for a big battery and drive down costs, if the charging infrastructure is there.
“It is dependent on having a fairly dense charging network,” he said. Manhattan has around 500 chargers, but would need at least three times as many to accommodate a switch to autonomous electric vehicles.
The research could have implications for urban planners in other large cities, where an increasing number of short trips are being taken using ride-hailing services such as Uber or Lyft. It could also help speed up the adoption of electric vehicles.
“For a long time, personal transportation seemed like the hardest problem to solve,” said Brian Gerke, another author of the study. “Now suddenly it seems like there's an obvious path to achieving it, which is the electrification of vehicles coupled with changing the way we get around from private vehicle ownership to shared approaches. Shared approaches are starting to work in urban areas.”