Studying Battery Range and Range Anxiety for Electric Vehicles based on Real Travel Demands

Abstract

Determination of appropriate battery ranges is critical for developing and utilizing electric cars, which remains an active research topic. In particular, the issues of range anxiety have not been well studied concerning the battery design. Towards these research gaps, this study firstly investigates the baseline battery ranges based on the actual travel data collected from a large-scale longitudinal naturalistic driving study in the Midwestern USA. The occurrences and severity levels of range anxiety are then studied given the baseline, which leads to an augmented optimization model to eliminate such issues. Results show that in the baseline model, 60% of drivers can replace their gas cars entirely with 400-mile battery ranges, and less than 40% can do so with 200-mile battery ranges. Even when all the travel needs are satisfied, the optimal battery ranges can still cause range anxiety issues for all the drivers. An additional 25 miles of battery range can help solve the problem based on the improved optimization results.