Improvement on Driving Comfort and Energy Consumption of Electric Vehicle through Throttle Signal Control

An electric vehicle conversion project often faces the problem of a sudden and non-smooth acceleration. From this, we see a great demand in improving the throttle control to have a better human-machine interface and better controllability and safe operation of an electric vehicle. Additional improvement on throttle control also helps to reduce energy consumption during acceleration which prolongs the driving range of the vehicle. This work presents a practical method to provide a smooth start for an electric vehicle with brushless DC (BLDC) motor using arduino microcontroller. Additional control algorithms between the throttle and motor controller are implemented with the microcontroller. Two sets of algorithm, which can be used at the same time, have been developed in order to reach the goal of smoother acceleration, better controllability, and lower energy consumption. Tests have been carried out on our in-house developed vehicle, Electric Caterham, to validate the effectiveness of different algorithms. We expect a 10% reduction in energy consumption during acceleration. This paper presents the change in acceleration performance after implementing the proposed feedback control system.