Experimental Investigation of the Accuracy Level of a Straightforward Systematic Fuel Consumption Model for Small-Size Vehicles

Lately the simulation of driving cycles through the vehicle's longitudinal dynamics has become increasingly important and common for engineering design. Consequently is essential to evaluate the performance of the simulation through consistent validation metrics that allows a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data. This paper presents a simple systematic mechanical model that estimates the fuel consumption of an arbitrary small-size hatch back in a specific driving cycle, with all the modeling details of the energy balance throughout the system, as well as, the procedure of the test that reproduces the simulated conditions and the validation methods with different validation metrics. Besides, this work examines how the present metrics should be interpreted for assessing computational model accuracy, as well as, the impact of experimental measurement uncertainty on the accuracy assessment.