Transportation
Project Get Ready: Menu for Community Plug-In Readiness
Project Get Ready is an initiative that helps communities become electrified vehicle pioneers. This document outlines the actions communities should take to be ready for plug-in vehicles, and approximate costs of each action. This paper provides a summary of system-wide costs, benefits, and jobs. It also describes the role of…
U.S. Transformational Trucking—Environment and Efficiency in Freight Mobility
The American trucking industry moves 60 percent of America’s goods using 3.5 million tractors and 5.3 million trailers. Yet despite their ubiquity, tractor-trailer designs have remained fundamentally unchanged for fifty years. Within the trucking industry, long-haul heavy-duty (Class 7 and 8) trucks offer particularly great efficiency potential. Despite accounting for…
Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles and Environmentally Beneficial Load Building: Implications on California’s Revenue Adjustment Mechanism
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are poised to allow, for the first time, large-scale interaction between the transportation and electric utility sectors. Electricity is a more efficient vehicle fuel than are liquid fossil fuels, and it can reduce system-wide greenhouse-gas emissions by transferring energy demand and emissions from the transportation to…
Transformational Trucks: Determining the Energy Efficiency Limits of a Class-8 Tractor Trailer
Feasible technological improvements in vehicle efficiency, combined with “long combination vehicles” (which raise productivity by connecting multiple trailers), can potentially raise the ton-mile efficiency of long-haul heavy tractor-trailers by a factor ~2.5 with respect to a baseline of 130 ton-miles/gal. Within existing technological and logistical constraints, these innovations (which do…
Triple Safety: Lightweighting Automobiles to Improve Occupant, Highway, and Global Safety
Automobilesʼ negative impact on human health and welfare includes traffic-related deaths and injuries as well as the deaths and injuries caused by automobilesʼ contribution to climate change and other global environmental degradation. This paper explores solutions that both enhance vehicle performance and reduce environmental impacts, and focuses on demonstrating the…
