Define efficiency and cost targets that make technologies cost competitive with Autonomie.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) and Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office (HFTO) aim to develop sustainable, affordable, and efficient technologies for passenger and freight movement. Technology development targets are used by DOE to accelerate the introduction of affordable and efficient vehicles in the United States. These target-setting activities balance the need to improve the efficiency of vehicles, while considering the additional cost incurred to the consumer, and provide a roadmap to improve components and strategies, such as engines, batteries, fuel cells, hydrogen storage, and lightweighting, to achieve cost parity with conventional vehicles.

Over the years, Autonomie, Argonne’s state-of-the-art vehicle energy consumption, performance, and cost system simulation tool, has been used to support technology technical targets for the USDrive partnership and the 21st Century Truck partnerships (21CTP), as well as VTO and HFTO. Autonomie was also used to develop the fuel cell and hydrogen storage targets for line haul applications in support of HFTO (see table below).

More recently, TechScape, which quantifies the impact of individual component technologies on the full life cycle cost of light duty passenger cars, as well as commercial vehicles, has been introduced, allowing engineers to quickly perform techno-economic analysis for a wide range of technologies and factoring in different cost assumptions at the component, vehicle, and operational level.

The latest USDrive Technical Targets developed for 2025 include:

• An electric vehicle battery at a cost of $100/kilowatt hour;
• An electric traction drive system at a cost of $6/kilowatt for a 100 kilowatt peak system;
• An automotive fuel cell system at a cost of $40/kilowatt for an 80 kilowatt net system;
• An onboard hydrogen storage system at a cost of $9/kilowatt hour, assuming a capacity of 5.6 kg hydrogen; and
• A 25 percent glider5 mass reduction, relative to comparable 2012 vehicles, at cost not to exceed $5/lb saved.

For more information, you can read and download the USDrive 2020 Partnership Plan and