Commercial vehicle fleets will electrify sooner or later—the savings from lower maintenance and energy costs are substantial, and growing. However, the math behind a transition to EVs can be quite complicated. EVs are less standardized than diesel vehicles, and their total cost of ownership (TCO) can vary based on a wide array of factors, from battery sizes to electricity prices to charging times.
Now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has released a new version of its Transportation Technology Total Cost of Ownership (T3CO) tool, which is designed to provide comprehensive insights into the total life-cycle costs of electrified commercial vehicles.
“When researchers, manufacturers and fleet owners are making decisions about what vehicles to invest in, they need a total cost of ownership analysis with a level of detail that hasn’t been possible in the past,” said Alicia Birky, an NREL commercial vehicles researcher who led the tool’s most recent developments. “T3CO gives researchers and other decision makers the best possible tools for understanding how to meet a fleet’s needs with new vehicle powertrains, and what trade-offs they might see with different technologies.”
T3CO has been in use at NREL for more than five years. Now, a rebuilt, user-friendly version is available to the public as a free, open-source tool.
“Anyone with Python knowledge can install T3CO and begin to create their own analyses,” said NREL’s Harish Panneer Selvam. “We’ve restructured the whole tool to make it as useable and accessible as possible.”
New features include a batch mode, which allows T3CO to run tens of thousands of vehicle simulations in a short period; and an optimization module that allows users to size vehicle components to meet performance and operational requirements at minimum cost.
“T3CO’s optimization toolbox trades off the value of different energy-saving approaches, like aerodynamics and lightweighting, against the cost of larger motors and batteries,” Panneer Selvam said. “It’s able to consider thousands of vehicle specifications to find the least expensive combination that meets the user’s needs.”
Users can analyze three separate categories of costs:
- Capital costs, such as vehicle and infrastructure purchase prices and taxes.
- Operating costs, such as recharging maintenance and insurance.
- Opportunity costs—less obvious expenses of operating a decarbonized vehicle, such as lost productivity when vehicles are charging or fueling, and the possibility of reduced payload capacity.
“It’s easy to figure out how much it costs to repair a vehicle and how much it costs for fuel, and then add it up and provide a TCO. That’s not what T3CO does,” Panneer Selvam said. “We estimate a customized TCO for a specific vehicle, in a specific location, for its specific operations.”
- T3CO can assess the relative merits of different vehicle types for a particular use case. For example, it can help users determine whether a hybrid or battery-electric vehicle is the best fit for certain operations, identify the optimal battery size, and find the ideal cost for individual ZEV components in order to reach cost parity with legacy vehicles.
- T3CO can help identify how a specific vehicle’s operations affect its TCO. Rather than using estimates, T3CO can use real-world data on vehicle duty cycles.
- T3CO can predict how new technologies might affect vehicle TCO. As new charging technologies such as wireless charging become widespread, T3CO can help users understand the cost implications.
- T3CO can help chart out a phased approach for vehicle decarbonization, identifying the specific vehicles that can be easily replaced with today’s EVs.