ELECTRIC VEHICLES

Sivasubramani.G
920822105027
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Dr.k.Rajesh

ABSTRACT
Electrification of vehicles has been recognised as a key part of meeting global climate change targets and a
key aspect of sustainable transport. Here, an integrative and bird’s-eye view of scholarly research on
Electric Vehicles (EV) is provided with a focus on an objective and quantitative determination of research
trends. The analyses suggest that areas of EV research linked to (i) charging infrastructure, (ii) EV adoption,
(iii) thermal management systems and (iv) routing problem have been the distinct trending topics in recent
years. While hybrid EV proves to have been a dominant keyword, its frequency of use has either flattened
out in recent years or is notably on the decline across major subfields of EV research. The findings provide
objective indications about the directions to which EV research is currently headed. A secondary outcome is
the determination of references that have been most instrumental in developing each major stream of EV
research.
 INTRODUCTION
The history of Electric Vehicles (EVs) is as old as the history of the
automobile. Actually, the first experimental light-weight EVs appeared already in the mid-
1830 s, and at the beginning of the 20th century, they were the most common vehicle
type in the US. However, by the end of World War I, they had lost the race against the
internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle and disappeared from the market (Høyer, 2008).
While a number of factors contributed to the success of the ICE vehicle, limited range and
expensive batteries, were major contributors (Duarte et al., 2021; Patil et al., 2022).
These two barriers have continued to hinder EVs from gaining real market breakthroughs
through the decades (Chakraborty et al., 2020). There have been waves of EVs during the
last 100 years, pushed by policy to address resource constraints related to fossil fuels,
primarily during World War II to save fuel prioritised for the military, and during the 70s,
due to the oil crisis. From the 90s onward, the curbing of emissions—at first mainly
related to local air quality and later carbon emissions affecting climate change—has been
the main political motivator. In California, the promotion of EVs started in the 90s to
address smog issues, especially in Los Angeles, leading to the Zero Emission Vehicle
mandates instituted by the California Air Resources Board. Even though these were
amended to Lower Emissions Vehicles, they still had an influence on technological
development such as batteries for hybrid EVs (Bedsworth and * Corresponding author. E-
mail address: [email protected] (M. Haghani). Contents lists available at
ScienceDirect Transportation Research Part D journal homepage:
www.elsevier.com/locate/trd https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2023.103881 Received 15 March
2023; Received in revised form 12 July 2023; Accepted 12 August 2023
• Commercial modern hybrid vehicles were first available in Japan strongly pushed by governmental initiated
R&D support programs to advance, at first, battery EVs, and later, other alternative fuel vehicles (Åhman,
2006). Pushes from the government have either been directed toward R&D support for the industry, not
surprisingly prevalent in car-producing countries such as Japan and Germany (Altenburg et al., 2016) and/or
market support. The most prominent example of market support is probably Norway which also has the
largest market share with 86% of new sold cars in 2021 (IEA, 2022). The background of the success is a long
history of high subsidies that started already in the 1990 s making EVs price competitive with conventional
vehicles (Figenbaum, 2017). China is one of the countries that has pushed hardest for EVs, especially after
2009. The strong push is motivated both by air quality and the opportunity to leap-frog technical
development and seriously compete in the automotive industry (Daina et al., 2017; Altenburg et al., 2022).
In the EU, the tightening of tail-pipe CO2 targets for the automotive industry has in recent years led to
increased market shares of EVs (Iwan et al., 2021). Driven by the political push in several countries, the
research and development of EVs have significantly intensified since the 1990 s which can be observed in an
increasing number of patents being registered (Wolbertus et al., 2021; Altenburg et al., 2022). The effects of
this development on the scientific literature have, so far, not been documented. There have been several
reviews concerning EVs, but these have mainly been focused on specific subjects within the field such as
consumer preferences (Liao et al., 2017) and adoption (Coffman et al., 2017); incentives (Hardman, 2019);
business models (Ziegler et al., 2022); charging infrastructure (Shareef et al., 2016; Funke et al., 2019);
connections with the electric grid (Richardson, 2013); environmental impacts (Hawkins et al., 2012a,
2012b). However, there is, to our knowledge, no overall computational review of the literature on EVs, its
different components and fields, and connections and how these have developed over time at a broader
scope. Different topic experts within the field of EV may have different perceptions about the composition
and research trends of the field. The current work is aimed to address this knowledge gap by providing an
objective and quantitative determination of the trends in EV research. We believe that, given the
multidisciplinary nature of the research on EV, scholars and practitioners can benefit from a broad-scope
computational analysis of the literature, providing insights that otherwise are not obtainable from
conventional literature analyis with smaller scope. This can encourage synergy and collaboration between
scholars that reside in various sectors of this research, and more importantly, can provide an objective
categorisation of research streams within the field along with a quantitative determination of the extent of
activities within each stream and their variations over time.1 This ultimately leads to the determination of
hot topics, cold topics and emerging topics within this research field. A side outcome of the analyses is the
determination of the fundamental references that have been instrumental to the development of each
research stream within the field of EV. This can facilitate future conventional reviews within this field. The
analyses identify temporal variations and trends in EV literature based on objective metrics obtained from
nearly 34,000 articles on EVs. Overall, the findings of the study provide objective indications as to the
directions to which the scholarly literature of EVs is currently headed.
 Methods
The data Search strategy—The underlying data for the study was sourced from the Web of Science
(WoS) Core Collection. The choice of database is based on the fact that WoS data has more specificity, while
e.g. Google Scholar is not capable of generating the needed data. WoS and Scopus have shown to have high
overlapping content (Mongun & Paul-Hus, 2016). A simple term-based search query string was formulated as
(TI=“electric vehicle*” OR AK=“electric vehicle*”) and applied to the Advanced Search section of the WoS.2 In
this query, TI and AK respectively specify Field Tags for Title and Author Keywords of articles. The number of
identified items prior to 1990 was insignificant, so the results were confined to 1990–2021. No restriction was
set on the document type. Therefore, the search essentially identifies any document indexed by the WoS and
published since 1990 till December 2021 that have mentioned electric vehicle(s) in their title or keyword list.
Nearly N = 34,000 articles were identified and their details were exported and stored in the form of text files.
This information includes for each document, the title, list of authors and their affiliations (country and
institute), journal name, year of publication, abstract text, keywords and reference list. All search queries have
been made in English which excludes literature only published in local languages and thus might miss some
developments and trends happening within national research communities. Visaluisation of Similarities analysis
— Scientometric methods were used on the data to obtain high level insight on the development EV literature.
The method of Visualisation of Similarities (VOS) (Van Eck et al., 2010) was employed to discover divisions of
the EV literature. Additionally, VOSviewer software and its embedded text mining algorithms were used to
identify specific phrases from each publication’s title and abstract and to identify clusters of such terms. 1 The
methodology of computational review suits particularly multidisciplinary topics such as EV, in that, it enables
researchers of each subdomain to become familiar with the general trends in other subdomains. For example,
in this case, the study introduces research trends generated by transportation researchers to electrical
engineers and vice versa. This aim cannot be fulfilled through conventional and manual systematic literature
reviews due, simply, to the limited capacity of individual researchers to process, categorise and synthesise large
sets of articles. 2 One should note that that there are alternative terms to "electric vehicle(s)", such as “electric
cars”, or “new energy vehicles”, but in order to maximise the specificity of the dataset (i.e., to minimise
potential false positives), we only used the mainstream and dominant term in the search query. We
investigated the number of articles that mentioned “new energy vehicle(s)” or “electric car(s)” in either title or
keywords, but not “electric vehicle(s)”, in order to estimate the number of items that our search might have
missed. The answer was 632, which constitutes only 1.8% of the overall size of the existing data
 Discussions and conclusions

• Electrification is a key technology within the transport field to reach climate goals. While the history of
electrification is as old as the history of the automobile, it is not until the last 20 years that we see that the
research has really gained momentum. In this paper, we have studied the scholarly research trends by
analysing patterns of document co-referencing of the period 1990–2021. Our results show several
interesting trends, gaps, and need for future development of EV research, industry, and policy. The
dominant research fields have been electrical engineering & computer science. We see a certain leveling off
in research activity in these fields during recent years. However, we believe this might be a temporary result
given the continued need for research and development of autonomous driving technologies in EV. These
will be necessary to improve transportation safety and efficiency and to minimise energy consumption by
optimising driving patterns and reducing traffic congestion. However, this development needs to be aligned
with policies not to induce more traffic and thus energy demand (Sprei, 2018). Energy & fuels and
environmental studies are gaining in activity (even though the narrower environmental assessment of EVs
has M. Haghani et al. Transportation Research Part D 123 (2023) 103881 15 peaked). With more EVs on the
road, the demand for electricity to power these vehicles will increase, impacting the energy sector. Thus, we
see that this is an area with expected growth, especially related to the integration of renewable energy. For
example, research trends in the United States have shown that EV adoption is driving a transition to cleaner
sources of electricity generation, such as wind and solar power (Taalbi et al., 2021). In addition, the
development of new battery technologies for EVs has led to innovations in energy storage, which has
applications beyond the transportation sector. Advances in battery technology could lead to the creation of
more efficient and cost-effective energy storage solutions for renewable energy sources like wind and solar
power. In China, the government is investing heavily in the development of advanced battery technologies
for both EVs and energy storage applications (Li et al., 2019). Furthermore, the adoption of EVs will also
impact the oil and gas industry as it reduces the demand for fossil fuels used in transportation. This shift
towards electric vehicles will create new challenges and opportunities in the energy industry, requiring a
comprehensive understanding of the relationship between EVs and energy-related fields. Future research
could develop this further by investigating how EV research trends compare to other energy-related fields to
better understand the broader implications of EVs on the energy sector. By studying the trends and
identifying the uniqueness of EV research, we can develop a comprehensive approach to meet the energy
needs of the future while reducing carbon emissions. This can be achieved by analysing and comparing
research trends in other domains, such as renewable energy, energy storage, and sustainable
transportation. Overall, the relationship between EVs and energy-related fields is complex and multi-
dimensional. As such, a comprehensive understanding of this relationship is essential to effectively address
the challenges and opportunities posed by the growing adoption of EVs