Advanced Drive Systems and Infrastructure for Electric or Hybrid Buses, Vans and Passenger Cars (II)

Abstract

In part I of this paper, attention has been firstly paid to general aspects of the introduction of electric and hybrid vehicles to reduce the air pollution.It has been shown that the emissons by electric vehicle are significantly lower than for petrol and diesel vehicles, except for sulphur dioxide, but the last one is due to reduce significantly in the future.A discussion of the daily mileage led to the conclusion that the present-day car fleet is conceived for trips (more than 100 km) that only represent less than 10% of the total number of trips or at the most 30% (i. e. all those trips longer than 10 km) of the total number of trips. It must be particularly stressed that electric and hybrid vehicle technology is clearly still in the infancy of its development. The basic structure of the electric vehicle is quite simple. A tentative description of the mission characteristics of city cars, passenger cars, vans, minibuses and buses has been performed together with upper level of useful characteristics.The characteristics of future type of batteries and of presently available batteries have been given to allow a comparison with the 500 W/kg power density of a widespread typical internal combustion engine. In this part II, after a short description of the hybrid solutions, we will devote some space to the presentation of the State of the Art of the electric components of EV’s and HV’s. This presentation has two main goals:– to show that the today technology allows without doubt to “assemble” an electric or a hybrid vehicle:– to try to indicate the long way still to be covered before the grade of optimization of the vehicles with internal combustion engine (ICE), after a century of development, can be reached.The role of the infrastructure and of two important scientific associations (AVERE and CITELEC) will finally be explained in the third part as to their impact on the future development and introduction of EV’s and HV’s.