A Proposal for an Empirical Approach to the Re-creation of Vehicle Drive Cycles

Vehicles such as buses, delivery trucks, mining equipment, and motorsport vehicles often repeat a highly defined pattern, route, or track during normal use. For these vehicles, standard dynamometer drive cycles are of little use. In this paper it is proposed that deriving a vehicle drive cycle from empirical data collected from on-board vehicle sensors would produce more accurate vehicle characteristic predictions for special purpose vehicles. This study answers the question “Is it possible to use recorded vehicle data to replicate a real world driving scenario for the purpose of vehicle diagnostics?” To reduce the complexity of the project, an electric go-kart is to be used as test vehicle. Keywords—CAN bus, Chassis Dynamometer, Drive Cycle, Gokart.