An Economic and In-Service Emissions Analysis of Conventional, Hybrid and Electric Vehicles for Australian Driving Conditions

Hybrid and fully electric vehicles are becoming more common as a response to rising fuel prices and greenhouse considerations. While the benefits of electrification on urban air quality have been studied quite widely, financial assessments of the various alternative vehicle forms are less common, particularly for Australian driving conditions. The aim of this paper is therefore to identify the scenarios under which different vehicle configurations are attractive to the vehicle owner. A Class-E conventional vehicle is compared with full-electric, plug-in hybrid, parallel hybrid, series hybrid and mild hybrid electric vehicle configurations. A simulation model of a conventional internal combustion engine based large sized car is developed and validated against experimental data. The conventional vehicle model is then systematically altered to obtain its increasingly electric variants. The fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are simulated on the legislative NEDC drive cycle and the more representative Australian Urban Drive Cycle (AUDC). The outcomes of these tests are used to estimate the total cost of ownership and in-service emissions, thus allowing the cost of emissions mitigation to be approximated for the different vehicles.

Different scenarios are considered for the pricing of energy and major powertrain components. This provides a baseline assessment based on current prices and projections, as well as ‘electrification favorable’ and ‘electrification unfavorable’ scenarios. The impact on vehicle emissions of significant penetration of renewable energy into the Australian electricity grid is also considered.