‘Smart cars’ or ‘intelligent cars’
equipped with sensors to predict
traffic flows can give the same fuel
efficiency as hybrid vehicles, a study
has showed.
The study appears in Transport
Research Part C: Emerging
Technologies, a journal published by
the Elsevier group.
Hybrid vehicles such as the popular
Toyota Prius have an electric motor
and a fossil-fuel engine, which are
deployed at different stages of the
driving cycle to provide fuel economy.
In contrast, intelligent cars are
conventional vehicles fitted with
telematics.
These are sensors and receivers that
work in a network, swapping
information about the traffic ahead to
speed up the car or slow it down so
that the ride becomes smooth and
avoids the occurrence of stop-start,
which drains fuel.
The technology for road telematics
already exists, but given questions on
safety and other issues that surround
it, it is only being deployed in a
small handful of field tests.
According to a report by AFP,
engineers at Melbourne University
compared how the two novel
technologies matched on fuel
efficiency.
For the test runs, they used an
unconverted saloon, or sedan, as the
benchmark and three driving cycles,
configured to the Australian, North
American and European urban
lifestyles.
The engineers calculated that a hybrid
version of the car would deliver fuel
economy of 15-25% over the unconverted
vehicle.
This saving was matched when the
benchmark car was fitted with basic
telematics that predicted traffic
flows as little as seven seconds
ahead, using the Australian drive
cycle. Using the US and European
cycles, hybrid-matching fuel economy
was reached with a look-ahead
predictability of less than 60
seconds.
If the predictability was boosted to
180 seconds, the newly intelligent car
was 33% more fuel-efficient than when
it was unconverted.
In their computations, the engineers
at Melbourne University included
factors such as the presence of
‘unintelligent’ cars on the road that
would impede the efficiency of the
look-forward technology.
The authors of the study say that the
figures are a useful contribution to
the public policy debate about fuel
economy, which is also a key issue in
efforts to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions.
If simple and effective sensor
networks can be installed in cities
and cars, people who are interested in
fuel-savings benefits will question
the value of buying hybrids, given
their hefty price tag, the study
suggests.
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