Study of Hilly Region Road for Electric Scooters

Electric scooters are booming in India's automotive industry, yet their presence is less felt on hilly roads. The motivation behind this article is the less or no visibility of electric scooters in hilly region cities of India. The information of hill angle is essential for road load analysis of hilly roads. This paper presents a cost-effective and straightforward procedure to find the road grade from the data (speed, altitude, time, distance) collected from an ICE scooter using a GPS-based app on a smartphone in Shillong city. Further, from the data collected, the road load characteristic is studied for synthesizing the power and torque requirement of electric scooters for such hilly roads. The results show that the torque demand increases with the increase in the hill angle value, leading to trade off some scooter speed for a given power. For an electric scooter to be suitable for such an aggressive road, it should have a high-power motor with a high current rating and high current capacity battery banks.