Empirical Study of Real-world Electric Vehicle Taxi's Energy Consumption

In Norway the number of electric vehicles is exploding. Norway is at the moment the biggest buyer of electric vehicles. A lot is known about emission and energy consumption from conventional vehicles, but there is less research on electric vehicles under real-world conditions. A taxi operator decided to try 6 Nissan Leafs and to see how they could be used most efficiently, this paper looks at the how energy consumption was collected and presents results of the analysis. The Nissan Leaf is a modern vehicle in every sense and it is also connect to the internet. Nissan provided the authors with a firmware update that made the vehicles into probe vehicles for the project. Thus energy consumption data is collected from the internal vehicle communication bus and transferred to Nissan's back end system. For every trip data on traction energy consumption, energy to the climate system, energy used for other purposes and regenerated energy were recorded along with global positioning system (GPS) positions every 10 seconds. To calculate the environmental impact of moving to electrified vehicles the route data was used to simulate emissions from a conventional vehicles using emissions functions derived from the ARTEMIS project. The paper shows that there is a difference between general styles of driving and differences between winter and spring driving.