European Initiatives for User-Centric Design of Electric Vehicles

Abstract

E-mobility is revolutionizing the automotive industry by improving energy-efficiency, lowering CO2 and non-exhaust emissions, innovating driving and propulsion technologies, redefining the hardware-software-ratio in the vehicle development, facilitating new business models, and transforming the market circumstances for electric vehicles (EVs) in passenger mobility and freight transportation. Ongoing R&D action is leading to an uptake of affordable and more energy-efficient EVs for the public at large through the development of innovative and user-centric solutions, optimized system concepts and components sizing, and increased passenger safety. Moreover, technological EV optimizations and investigations on thermal and energy management systems as well as the modularization of multiple EV functionalities result in driving range maximization, driving comfort improvement, and greater user-centricity. This paper presents the latest advancements of multiple EU-funded research projects under the Horizon Europe framework and showcases their complementarities to address the European priorities as identified in the 2Zero SRIA, namely EFFEREST, MINDED, and SmartCorners. EFFEREST targets energy efficiency, comfort, safety, and affordability of EVs through considering knowledge from real-fleet behavior and personalization of data. MINDED aims to maximize EV's driving range by improving the thermal- and energy management of an electric minibus to reduce energy consumption while optimizing thermal comfort, and therefore directly impacting the user acceptance. SmartCorners provides scalable, flexible, and user-centric smart corner systems including e-axles and e-corners based on in-wheel powertrains. SmartCorners aims at introducing smart corner systems based on in-wheel powertrains as underlaying technology toward software-defined vehicles, enabling rightsizing, holistic optimization, innovative fault mitigation and actuator allocation strategies as well as more efficient, adaptive, predictive, and personalized system operation.