Evaluation of Current, Future, and Beyond Li-Ion Batteries for the Electrification of Light Commercial Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities

While the electrification of the transportation sector is underway with a consistently increasing market share, segments like light commercial vehicles (LCVs) have not seen any significant market penetration. The major barriers are primarily in the shortcomings in specific energy, power, and cost associated with Li-ion batteries. With an initiative from several automakers to electrify other segments, there is a need to critically examine the performance requirements and to understand the factors governing such a transition in the near-term and long-term. In this study, we develop a systematic methodological framework to analyze the performance demands for electrification through an approach that couples considerations for battery chemistries, load profiles based on a set of vehicle-specific drive cycles, and finally applying these loads to a battery pack that solves a 1-D thermally coupled battery model within the AutoLion-ST framework. Using this framework, we analyze the performance of a fully electric LCV over its lifetime under various driving conditions and explore the trade-offs between battery metrics and vehicle design parameters. We find that in order to enable a driving range of over 400-miles for LCVs at a realistic battery pack weight, specific energies of over 400 Wh/kg at the cell-level and 200 Wh/kg at the pack-level needs to be achieved. A crucial factor that could bring down both the energy requirements and cost is through a vehicle re-design that lowers the drag coefficient to about 0.3.