Electric Vehicles and Driving Range Extension – A Literature Review.

Abstract

Electric vehicles are gaining popularity due to their low carbon footprint and ease of integration with renewable energy. They are an important element in the smart grid ecosystem. Increasing the driving range of storage driven electric vehicles is the biggest challenge facing the light weight electric vehicle industry. A literature review has been performed to identify various techniques to improve the driving range. Various methods of driving range improvement such as new storage topologies, switching techniques, motor configurations are studied. A new quantitative measure called as impact factor has been derived to see the effect of each technique on the driving range. Impact factor for different methods has been calculated. It is shown that increasing the storage capacity has the highest impact factor on the driving range.