The yellow van with the Deutsche Post DHL branding has been made bespoke for the German postal firm. As the electric vehicle (EV) moves noiselessly through the cobbled street in Bonn, it's 30 sensors are sending 100 different data readings wirelessly to a central server, while 30 data streams are being sent back to it.
As well as location, speed and battery charge, the van is communicating the temperature of various parts for maintenance planning, if its doors are open and even if it is raining. The vehicle combines two of the most prevalent technology trends in automotive engineering this decade – electrification and connectivity – and in doing so leapfrogs the mainstream competition.
The van wasn't produced by Renault, Mercedes or Nissan, but by a spin-out from Aachen University formed less than five years ago. The Streetscooter project, which consisted of a consortium of academics and 80 industrial companies, aimed to develop an “e-mobility” smart connected vehicle platform, an electric car, from scratch to market in four years. Despite a core team of just 15 engineers, a prototype was ready after just 18 months.
The streetscooter platform was initially designed with passenger cars in mind
The project's platform was adaptable for a range of vehicles, from bicycles and passenger cars and delivery vans. The work caught the eye of Deutsche Post DHL, the worlds largest postal company. A design based on the the platform was ready by 2012 and in series production by 2013.
Deutsche Post DHL now have around 150 Streetscooter / Deutsche Post DHL vans in service in Germany, 20 in Bonn. A deal made last year saw the postal company purchase Streetscooter. Peter Burgraaf, chief executive of Streetscooter Research, says the aim is to produce 20,000 more vans over the next five years. This will make Deutsche Post DHL's electric vehicle (EV) fleet the largest in the world.
The van has an 80km range and can make up to 200 delivery stops a day, up to 300 days a year. Burgraaf calls the van “perfect for the postal market”. The team used a “return on engineering” approach that took the flexible connected EV platform and prioritised the development of features with the highest value for specific markets.
“We were able to develop, test and produce a car with minimum resources, in less than 10% of the time it takes to develop an EV and about half the time it takes to develop a car,” Burgraaf says. “For example it has no infotainment or air conditioning, but it has a bumper which is divided into four parts to reduce the cost of maintenance.”
The van in a test cell
Other customised design features include three doors at the rear for ease of access, an interior optimised for storage and a windscreen that offers the best visibility.
Streetscooter always aimed to use a “disruptive network approach” with its 80 industrial partners, to reduce product development time significantly by working closely on specifying and developing components and materials. But the small team of engineers also leveraged the connectivity features of the e-mobility platform to speed up development. Direct feedback was gathered from live testing of the car and settings were remotely changed, to quickly assess how performance, such as range, compared against design requirements. The data was analysed and delivered to suppliers so they could tell Streetscooter what could be improved in the car.
Burgraaf says: “The connectivity was important for our engineering process. With a small team you are not able to do a lot of testing and pre-series production like in a normal car company.
“Most car companies develop the car, then get feedback from the market. We started that very early to improve the car. It's helpful to get early prototypes into the field and get data from them while still in the development process. ”
The connectivity features can also provide data for other uses. Thousands of cars with rain sensors for the operation of wipers also provides meteorological data. In Switzerland they have fitted postman's bikes with sensors to assess the quality of roads, which is supplied to the Swiss government to help maintenance. The company is also developing a “gamification” system which will provide feedback to the driver to enourage them to modify their driving behaviour to suit driving an EV.
“When we developed the connectivity solution we tried to find out what the customer needs. So for passenger cars there is internet and remote service. But there is so much more you can do for delivery vehicles,” says Burgraaf.
In operation, the increased data available gives real time feedback of things such as driving and energy consumption. The fleet manager can use a map on a computer to deep dive into regions, into individual vehicles and statistics. A “dashboard” on the manager's computer screen gives fast access to vital statistics. The software for the connectivity features was developed using Thingworx, a software tool from PTC, which also publishes engineering software such as design program Creo and PLM package Windchill.
In the future the company plans to introduce connected services such as performance monitoring, predictive servicing, automatically updating software and integration into support services. Burgraaf says: “Right now we are integrating software updates into our vehicles. That is not easy because they are security issues. It's high risk if anyone could manipulate the software in the car.”
Cyberhacking is a challenge faced by all products connected to the internet. So fleet vehicles, where there are many additional benefits and a greater reduction in cost of ownership, alongside luxury cars where the cost of batteries does not matter, remain the likeliest places EVs will really takeover the market. Geographically, it looks even more likely Streetscooter will deliver that for the first time in Germany.