Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a key metric in commercial vehicle purchase
decisions and evaluation of advanced technologies such as battery electric and
fuel cell vehicles (BEVs and FCEVs). Inputs derived from aggregate operating
data, such as annual miles of travel and average fuel efficiency, as used in
most TCO tools, may be inadequate for assessing technologies in specific
applications. To provide more accurate estimates, the Transportation Technology
Total Cost of Ownership (T3CO) model integrates vehicle simulation using the
Future Automotive Systems Technology Simulator (FASTSim™). T3CO incorporates
opportunity costs that may arise when technologies do not provide equivalent
performance to conventional powertrains, such as reduced payload capacity and
added downtime for more frequent and longer duration refueling. While past
analyses used single duty cycles representative of average daily distance and
energy per mile, fueling dwell time is nonlinear with respect to daily energy
requirements and may not be captured with representative cycles. In this study,
T3CO is applied to real-world operational data collected over 32 months from
conventional Class 5 work trucks in three fleets, covering a variety of use
cases and variability in daily demands. Diesel, BEV, and FCEV powertrains were
simulated over the full data set, for a total of 1,986 vehicle days and 145,919
miles each. Analysis of duty cycle variability results in up to a 61% difference
in fleet-level weighted average TCO compared to analysis over a single
representative day. While diesel and FCEV TCO results are sensitive to fuel
cost, BEV TCO is sensitive to the downtime from occasional daytime charging
present in the total life cycle and not reflected in a subset “representative
day.” For the studied fleets, these findings alter conclusions about the
relative cost-effectiveness of new technology options at both the vehicle and
fleet levels.
