Based on its own analysis of anonymized driving data, Ford is encouraging the adoption of a standard way to analyze driving data for OEMs and regulatory agencies to understand real-world electric driving usage in comparison to regulatory test cycles.

In a presentation at the recent SAE Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Technologies Symposium, (via Green Car Congress) Brett Hinds, Ford’s Chief Engineer, Electrified Powertrain Engineering, said that the company has used the MyFord Mobile service to collect data from 35,185 vehicles over more than 80.6 million trips since 2013.

Ford anonymizes the data and analyzes it using a customized suite of tools, then compares it to the Atlanta Regional Travel Survey, a representative benchmark of US driving behavior.

“We have very good representation,” says Hinds. “This gives us confidence [that] we are not just representing [Ford’s three plug-in vehicles], we are representing the entire driving population.”

For every customer, Ford has established a distribution of trip profiles, based on where they were going, how often they were moving and how often they started the vehicle. All that data can be mathematically represented by a Gaussian distribution, Hinds said. “This is the piece that Ford would like to share for the industry to consider moving forward. The Gaussian distribution represents your normal distribution of drives around an average day. Then there is an exponential decay that represents special trips.”

“OEMs should adopt a standard way of analyzing data and use this data to design next generation BEVS or xEVs. We also think it gives us an opportunity to discuss with regulatory agencies, who can also use this data to set regulations that more closely reflect real-world driving conditions.”

Source: Green Car Congress