Engineers have been putting a lot of efforts into making EVs as energy efficient as they can be but the battery pack of an electric vehicle is not able to store as much energy as a full tank of gasoline which is why the range of an electric vehicle is significantly lower in comparison to a conventional-powered car.
Many people working in this domain are trying to fix this problem by creating new battery packs, and lightweight chassis designs which represent attempts for making EVs travel longer before charging the battery pack.
We have some interesting news coming from sunny California where a team of researchers believe that they have found a way to improve the range of an electric vehicle by 10%. How? By redesigning the satellite navigation system of the vehicle. A team at UCR – University of California Riverside has obtained a one-year $95,000 research grant from the California Energy Commission and they have started working on creating a GPS-like device which is capable of providing the driver of an EV with the most efficient route.
This team at the University of California Riverside is planning on collecting rear-world data in order to create a complex algorithm which will allow drivers to select the most energy-efficient route available for their destination. This new system that is being developed will be capable of reacting to real-world situations considerably more accurate, in comparison to today’s GPS systems.
This new advanced GPS will be able to take into account factors such as the current traffic conditions, local weather forecast, as well as the weight of the cargo and passengers before the route is planned. By providing this dynamic route planning, an earlier project development conducted at University of California Riverside reached the conclusion that it could lower fuel consumption as well as greenhouse gas emissions coming from conventional-powered vehicles by up to 15%. For EVs, the team is estimating a 10% increase in range.
Source: Green Car Reports
