Advances in lithium ion battery pack technology have led to significant market penetration for electric vehicles (EVs), but there is still a need to develop new battery technologies, better control algorithms, and faster charging strategies to enhance further the ownership experience. Once developed, these advances must be validated. Unfortunately, fleet testing is not often an option because of the associated cost.

To address this issue and permit the validation of new technologies in the laboratory quickly, many studies are relying on synthetic driving cycles to mimic the usage cells would experience under actual utilization. Among the more popular ones are the Federal Urban Driving Schedule (FUDS), a US standard; the Dynamic Stress Test (DST) which is a simplified version of the FUDS cycle; and the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC), a European standard. The ability of these cycles to replicate EV usage is usually taken for granted; whereas, to the best of our knowledge, no study has scrutinized these cycles to establish if the induced degradation is indeed comparable with what is observed from real driving data.

It is proposed here to investigate the impact of the most-used, standardized driving cycles on state-of-the art lithium-ion cells and evaluate them against the impact of real driving in a laboratory-controlled environment. Different analysis techniques and metrics, such as voltage response, capacity, rate capability, and resistance, are employed to compare the most common synthetic driving cycles (FUDS, DST and NEDC) with scaled-down real driving data selected from the Hawai'i Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) in-house database. Two different sets of real driving data was used, one using a single commute in a loop and one using 25 similar commutes in a loop, to reveal any effect of traffic.

This study aimed to elucidate any significant discrepancies between simulated and real driving outcomes, determine the effect of traffic conditions, and propose possible improvements.