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Electric vehicles are seen as a key driver to address the issue of global warming, mainly through their zero tailpipe emissions operation and energy efficiency improvements. However, this does not solve the problem of urban chaos, related to traffic congestion and parking space cluttering, which contribute to increase human stress and overall economic productivity decrease. To address all these issues, electric urban buses come as an obvious solution, and they also have the advantages of being quieter than regular buses and of promoting a better travel experience to passengers. Nowadays there are already electric buses operating in some parts of the world and one of the main concerns is their high weight, which is mainly due to the amount of batteries they carry in order to have an adequate range.

Since the late 19th century until recently several electric vehicles have been designed, manufactured and used throughout the world. Some were just prototypes, others were concept cars, others were just special purpose vehicles and lately, a considerable number of general purpose cars has been produced and commercialized. Since the mid nineties the transportation sector emissions are being increasingly regulated and the dependency on oil and its price fluctuations originated an increasing interest on electric vehicles (EV). A wide research was made on existing electric/hybrid vehicle models. Some of these vehicles were just in the design phase, but most reached the prototype or full market production. They were divided into several types, such as NEVs, prototypes, concept cars, and full homologated production cars. For each type of vehicle model a technical historic analysis was made.

The automotive industry paradigm shift from convention internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles brought new technical challenges for automotive OEMs. During this shifting period, electric vehicles are expected to be produced on small volumes, requiring new design and production processes. In order to have a more flexible and efficient production system, OEMs and suppliers are working on modularity as a design tool to reduce the time to market, reduce the complexity of supply chains and reduce the total vehicle production cost. One of these modular components will be the chassis, which was introduced as a skate by GM on the Sequel concept. On this concept all the crashworthy components were included in the skate, over which an autobody was assembled. This skate-chassis included all the powertrain components, batteries, power electronics and motors, as well as braking and suspension systems.

Connectivity and systems integration together with weight and production cost reduction are among the main objectives of the automotive industry in electric vehicles development in particular, when concerns with smart grids integration and interoperability increases. At the same time vehicle systems reliability plays an important role as a decisive factor for market acceptance. Conventional automotive electrical systems comprehend a central ECU, with radial wiring harness architecture with power and signal cables. A different architecture is proposed with the aim of vehicle cable mass and cost reduction, simplification and increased reliability of the whole electrical control system. With this architecture there's also the aim to provide computing and communications capability to each electric component in a distributed way, in order to enable its integration with external systems like smart phones, networking services and smart grids.