Heavy duty hybrids to go zero-emission in cities, says TNO

Heavy duty hybrid vehicles in future may need to switch to zero emissions when entering a city - and be competitive in their total cost of ownership. Speaking at this week’s ITS European Congress in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Steven Wilkins, senior research scientist at TNO, discussed the ORCA (optimised real-world cost-competitive modular hybrid architecture for heavy duty vehicles) project’s objectives of matching the total cost of ownership with efficiency. “Connected to that is downsizing the engine

June 5, 2019 Read time: 2 mins

Heavy duty hybrid vehicles in future may need to switch to zero emissions when entering a city - and be competitive in their total cost of ownership.

Speaking at this week’s ITS European Congress in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Steven Wilkins, senior research scientist at 7087 TNO, discussed the ORCA (optimised real-world cost-competitive modular hybrid architecture for heavy duty vehicles) project’s objectives of matching the total cost of ownership with efficiency.

“Connected to that is downsizing the engine. We very much want to increase the electric range of these types of vehicles much more significantly than at present,” he added.

Research group TNO is responsible for the overall technical coordination of ORCA, an initiative which seeks to design a greener and affordable hybrid drivetrain for heavy duty vehicles.

Wilkins posed the question of the type of ITS data that is needed for the vehicles to run to the audience at a session entitled Contribution of ITS to improve efficiency and reduce Heavy Duty Vehicle emissions.

“Within a city area, perhaps supported by a lot of charging infrastructure you may have the ability for the vehicles to be highly electric, and for longer distances we stay more with a more liquid fuel,” he continued. “But there is a whole class of vehicles that need to operate within the city centre but have the extended range of longer distances, so this mixed functionality becomes important for being able to predict ahead exactly what the vehicle is going to do.”

For more information on companies in this article

TNO

ITS Europe experts share mobility lab lessons

“Real problems” need to emerge in the development of an urban mobility lab before you can begin to find solutions, according to Raimo Tengvall, project manager of Forum Virium Helsinki. Speaking at this week’s ITS European Congress in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Tengvall shared lessons learned from the company’s Jätkäsaari urban mobility lab in the Finnish capital, Helsinki. “In the Jätkäsaari area we were having 80 million passengers going through a street network of a new residential area where there is a

November 23, 2018

Venkat Sumantran: ‘Smart cities are more hype than reality’

For all the talk of smart cities, investment in systems lags significantly behind organic expansion in most places. Andrew Stone talks to Venkat Sumantran, who has been looking at how to create a coherent framework which could help authorities answer multiple mobility questions Two megatrends are posing unprecedented challenges to those trying to keep people moving around the world’s urban areas now - and in the years and decades to come. The first is rapid urbanisation. One in six of us lived in urban a