[TestDrive]

Originally Posted by Blue Bomber Man

I thought I should point you towards an existing spreadsheet that is the culmination of years of research (I believe it is someones PhD thesis) that is availible on the web.

Just search for Pamvec on google, it should turn up an excel file. It is extremely customizeable for many things that you have already included but also for things like: various drivetrains (hybrids, electric etc), driving models, can specify design goals, or just input known variants. When I used it to model my current car it nailed its MPG rating and I used it to model hypothetical cars.

FWIW here are links to:

the actual spread sheet in xls format
an html view of the spread sheet.
a pdf of the actual thesis (281 pages)

Abstract

This thesis presents a novel approach to modelling energy consumption in road vehicles – the Parametric Analytical Model of Vehicle Energy Consumption (PAMVEC).

The technique is offered as a complement to existing vehicle modelling tools, the majority of which are dynamic vehicle simulators such as ADVISOR. Dynamic vehicle simulators are powerful modelling tools with high precision and accuracy (error typically <5%), and this makes them ideally suited to detailed simulation, testing and refinement of vehicle designs as part of a design process. However, they can be disadvantaged by their complexity, their need for detailed powertrain component models (which often are not publicly available), and excessive computational requirements due to their inherently iterative nature. In the context of vehicle technology assessment where many vehicles or technologies may need to be compared, these attributes can make dynamic simulators quite costly and time-consuming to use. Furthermore, dynamic vehicle simulators rely upon deterministic driving cycles to represent the driving pattern. Existing cycles have been shown in the literature to be quite unrepresentative of real-world driving patterns, and this deterministic approach is particularly unsuited to the modelling of uncertainty. Again, these attributes are not desirable for the purposes of vehicle technology assessment.

In contrast, the PAMVEC tool is designed to be particularly well-suited to vehicle technology assessment. Relative to dynamic simulators, the PAMVEC lumped-parameter models are easier to analyse and interpret, requiring only minimal input data to produce a result, and the calculations are performed nearly instantaneously. Furthermore, with its parametric construction, PAMVEC is ideally-suited to performing sensitivity analyses and modelling of uncertainty. Its features include:

• Parametric analytical expressions for predicting vehicle energy consumption that are derived from the well-known road load equation
• Parametric analytical expressions to size powertrain components implicitly in terms of specified performance targets that include driving range
• A novel parametric driving pattern description that encompasses the multiple
• dimensions of real-world driving patterns, but is also well-suited to the modelling of uncertainty
• Simple component models based on parametric inputs for efficiency and specific power/energy
• Transparent implementation in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with calculations that occur almost instantaneously.