In a near future, platooning could become one of the most
accessible strategies to help reduce the consumption of fuel and
the emissions of toxic gases in the atmosphere, while also adding
safety to the users and generating a better traffic flow.
Nowadays, the auto industry and the governments are facing
enormous challenges to reduce the amount of pollution in the
atmosphere, to decrease the dependency on fossil fuels to generate
energy and to increase safety on the highways. Several approaches
are made, such as bio-fuels, hybrid and electric vehicles, engine
downsizing and new modes of transportation that are more versatile
and environmentally friendly. The downside is that most of this
efforts are costly and require time and expense to be put to
work.
Platooning is an alternative option to minimize the impact to
the environment profiting from the aerodynamic effects that occur
naturally around a moving vehicle. The technology is available and
can become production ready by the year 2020. This has been
evidenced by the project SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the
Environment), from the 7th European Framework Program. SARTRE is a
collaborative project of 7 companies from 4 different countries
that set out to develop a platooning system using off-the-shelf
technology and requiring no modification to the road
infrastructure.
To validate the previously mentioned benefits and to promote the
adoption of this technology, the project partners developed a fully
functional platoon prototype of 5 vehicles (2 trucks, 3 cars) and
assessed its performance. Applus+ IDIADA, formerly the Instituto de
Investigación Aplicada del Automóvil (Applied Automotive Research
Institute) was the partner in charge of performing the fuel
consumption evaluation and the system validation. For the fuel
consumption evaluation, two approaches were considered.
First, an aerodynamic simulation to know the approximate
reduction in aerodynamic coefficients and forces and then a set of
track tests to evaluate the real fuel consumption and to validate
the virtual data. The outcome was a reduction in the fuel
consumption for all the vehicles.
To complement the results, some workshops were carried out with
the relevant stakeholders, in order to obtain a set of proposals
and requirements in technology state of the art and legislation
changes required to adopt platooning on tomorrow's roads.