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Driven by stricter mandatory regulations on fuel economy improvement and emissions reduction, market penetration of electrified vehicles will increase in the next ten years. Within this growth, mild hybrid vehicles will become a leading sector. The high cost of hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) has somewhat limited their widespread adoption, especially in developing countries. Conversely, it is these countries that would benefit most from the environmental benefits of HEV technology. Compared to a full hybrid, plug-in hybrid, or electric vehicle, a mild hybrid system stands out due to its maximum benefit/cost ratio. As part of our ongoing project to develop a mild hybrid system for developing markets, we have previously investigated improvements in drive performance and efficiency using optimal gearshift strategies, as well as the incorporation of high power density supercapacitors.

This paper presents a smart electric scooter system consisting of a microprocessor based vehicle controller (integrating an embedded regenerative braking controller), a 300W Permanent Magnet (PM) DC motor, two low-power DC-DC converters to form a higher power DC-DC converter pack, a motor controller, a supercapacitor bank and a capacitor cell balancing sub-system.