With funding from the California Energy Commission, the California Hybrid, Efficient and Advanced Truck Research Center, contracted with the University of California, Riverside's College of Engineering to evaluate the performance of a Class 5 battery electric urban delivery vehicle over two standardized driving cycles and a steady state range test on a chassis dynamometer. The test vehicle, a Smith Electric Newton Step Van, was equipped with a proprietary data acquisition system which was set to record a wide variety of vehicle parameters at a 1 Hz sampling period. In addition, the chassis dynamometer was set to measure and record additional parameters. Lastly, a portable J1772 EVSE recorded both grid energy and power at 15-minute intervals.
This project provides a controlled test evaluation of the Smith Electric Newton Step Van. It recognizes the vehicle's potential for a successful delivery vehicle and identifies several important findings and areas that will need further research. The Newton Step Van is an efficient and clean alternative to equivalent diesel vehicles. The Newton Step Van showed an equivalent fuel economy between 38.4 and 46.4 MPGe on the three cycles used for this project. While Smith Electric Vehicles advertises a total driving range of up to 80 miles for the Newton Step Van, the chassis dynamometer testing estimated total driving range superior to 100 miles on both the HTUF4 and OCBC cycles.
