EcoCAR is North America's premier collegiate automotive engineering competition, challenging students with systems-level advanced powertrain design and integration. The EcoCAR Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition series is organized by Argonne National Laboratory, headline sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors, and sponsored by more than 30 industry and government leaders. In the last competition series, EcoCAR 2, fifteen university teams from across North America were challenged to reduce the environmental impact of a 2013 Chevrolet Malibu by redesigning the vehicle powertrain without compromising performance, safety, or consumer acceptability.
This paper examines the results of the EcoCAR 2 competition’s emissions and energy consumption (E&EC) on-road test results for several prototype plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The official results for each vehicle are presented along with brief descriptions of the hybrid architectures.
In addition to the official competition results, this paper investigates two methods used to utility factor (UF) weight E&EC test data. This investigation was conducted to select a methodology for calculating
E&EC results in the EcoCAR 3 competition, where teams will reduce the environmental impact of a 2016 Chevrolet Camaro. The paper uses the EcoCAR 2 Year 3 data to quantify the impacts of using both a fractional UF-weighting method and applying a single vehicle UF on E&EC results for electric and fuel energy consumption. In the discussion it is shown that both UF-weighting methods produced similar results for fuel and electric energy consumption for a representative test vehicle. UF-weighting of criteria emissions is also investigated.