GPS measurement of Swedish car movements for assessment of possible electrification

To enhance the transition to electrified vehicles, such as PHEVs, the use patterns of cars need to be well understood and thus information about individual vehicle’s movements over longer time periods is needed. This is of major importance for instance for optimal powertrain and battery design, estimation of consumer viability and potential for PHEVs and for assessment of policies for shifting energy use in transport sector from fuel to electricity. Good and publicly available data of this kind is today unfortunately lacking. The aim of this project has been to gather a larger amount of data on the characteristics and distribution of individual movements for privately driven cars in Sweden by measurement with GPS equipment. The logging was performed with commercial equipment containing a GPS unit, including a roof-mounted antenna, and a gprs communication unit. Data logged (2.5 Hz) were: time, position, velocity, and number and id of used satellites. The measurements started in June 2010 and ended in September 2012. The target has been to accomplish good quality measurements of at least 30 days for about 500 representative vehicles. The paper includes a description of the project, an analysis of its representativeness and some car movement statistics for the full results.