Development and Analysis of Rightsized Powertrains for Small Urban Vehicles

This work provides an overview of the key steps involved in designing an electric powertrain for an L7 category vehicle intended for urban and suburban environments. It focuses on mission-specific rightsizing and physical integration into small vehicles. Synthetic driving cycles of Helsinki, Finland, and Regensburg, Germany, created via activity-based transport modeling and dynamic vehicle simulation reveal that urban use cases do not require high power and torque. This allows for smaller battery capacities and electric motor ratings, leading to cost savings in mass production. Moreover, this paper introduces two powertrain variants: a low voltage option and an extensive high voltage option with both conventional conductive and wireless charging systems. The high voltage variant was selected for implementation and for that, the first measurement results are presented. Both low voltage and higher voltage options are technically feasible, but if wireless charging is preferred, the higher voltage configuration is more suitable from a system design perspective.