FLEET Model Tutorial

Pathways Selection Area continued:

To continue the Tutorial for the Pathways Selection Area, we're going to add one more pathway - this one representing hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Click the "New Pathway" button again to add another unspecified pathway.

2. Use the scroll bar to scroll down so that you can see the entirety of the new unspecified pathway.

• "Vehicle" combo box: "Spark Ignition ICE Hybrid-Electric Vehicle." This represents a hybrid vehicle with a spark-ignition engine and an electric drive, such as the Toyota Prius or Honda Civic hybrid.
• "Fuel" combo box: "Reformulated Gasoline."
• "Pathway" combo box: "30-ppm sulfur, 5.7% ethanol from corn by volume as oxygenate." Hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles fill up with the same fuel as our baseline conventional gasoline vehicle.

4. Click the "Relative results" check box to display the "Well-to-Wheels Results" as percentage changes relative to the baseline pathway. As you can see, due to the improved fuel economy of hybrid-electric vehicles, the hybrid gasoline-electric pathway uses 28.56% less petroleum energy as the baseline conventional gasoline vehicle pathway.

5. Using the color selector drop down box, select a blue color to represent our hybrid pathway (the first color in the left-most column).

6. In the "Model Parameters" area for the hybrid pathway, input the value "0.8" in the "Correlation to Baseline Fuel Economy" input box.

Like diesel vehicles, hybrid-electric vehicles are already more efficient than conventional gasoline vehicles. However, while not all improvements in fuel economy for conventional gasoline vehicles will translate to improvements for hybrid-electric vehicles, there are still efficiency improvements to be made to the electric drives of hybrid vehicles (utilizing more efficient and lighter lithium-ion batteries instead of the current industry-standard use of nickel-metal hydride batteries, for example), so we'll assume that improvements in fuel economy for hybrid vehicles keep pace with conventional gasoline vehicles.

7. Click the "Manual Input?" check box in the "Model Parameters" area.

As with the inputs in the Inputs Area, FLEET offers the option to set "Vehicle Stock" inputs for pathways using either exponential growth input and manual input modes. To set the "Vehicle Stock" inputs for the hybrid pathway, we'll use the manual input option this time, instead of setting the exponential growth inputs as we did for the diesel pathway. You'll now see that the "Year to Market," "Initial Market Penetration" and "Annual Growth Rate" boxes are grayed out and no longer accept inputs, while the input boxes for the years 2005-2030 now accept inputs.

• 2005: "0.2". There were approximately 200,000 hybrid-electric vehicles on the road in 2005.
• 2010: "1". We will assume that there will be one million hybrid-electric vehicles on the road by 2010.
• 2015: "6". We will assume that hybrid sales total 1 million new vehicles per year between 2011 and 2015.
• 2020: "16".
• 2025: "26".
• 2030: "36". We will assume that 2 million new hybrid-electric vehicles hit the road each year between 2016 and 2030, for a cumulative total of 36 million hybrids on the road by 2030.

9. To finish setting up this pathway, click the "Set Inputs" button and watch FLEET update the model. You should see the "Vehicle Stock" values for the baseline pathway decrease again to take into account the hybrid-electric vehicles on the road (you'll have to scroll up to see this change) and you'll see the Graph/Table Area update to show a blue 'wedge' representing the hybrid-electric vehicles on the road in each year.

The FLEET model should now look like the image below:

There's more...

To continue the Tutorial for the Pathways Selection Area, click here.
To return to the start of the Tutorial, click here.