European Commission | Analysing the real-world fuel and energy consumption of conventional and electric cars in Europe

ABSTRACT - The transport sector constitutes one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union. Although the literature is rich in studies assessing the factors influencing energy consumption in real world driving, few analyse the divergence between certified and real-world consumption on a fleet level and annual temporal resolution. The present work builds on the findings of previous studies to provide a complete simulation-based approach for fleet-level projections in real-world scenarios. A tailored simulation framework for fleet-wide analysis has been updated and validated extensively for current vehicle configurations. In addition to modelling, the analysis used data describing real-world conditions and vehicle characteristics representative of the European passenger car fleet and operation profile. Validation demonstrates good accuracy in simulating the vehicle measured consumption values with a near-zero mean error when simulating laboratory and on-road measurements. The impact of the certification procedure was quantified at 6% for both the combustion engine and battery electric vehicles. The influence of real-world factors such as traffic, ambient temperature and cabin air conditioning was quantified, and the results show a greater energy impact in the cold than in warm conditions.

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