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The rapid increase in the sophistication of vehicle automation demands development of evaluation protocols tuned to understanding driver-automation interaction. Driving simulators provide a safe and cost-efficient tool for studying driver-automation interaction, and this paper outlines general considerations for simulator-based evaluation protocols. Several challenges confront automation evaluation, including the limited utility of standard measures of driver performance (e.g., standard deviation of lane position), and the need to quantify underlying mental processes associated with situation awareness and trust. Implicitly or explicitly vehicle automation encourages drivers to disengage from driving and engage in other activities. Thus secondary tasks play an important role in both creating representative situations for automation use and misuse, as well as providing embedded measures of driver engagement.

The paper presents experimental results of a fuel cell powered electric vehicle equipped with supercapacitors. This hybrid vehicle is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI, Switzerland), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ), and several industrial partners. It is equipped with a fuel cell system with a nominal power of 48 kW and with supercapacitors that have a storage capacity of 360 Wh. Extensive tests have been performed on a dynamometer and on the road to investigate the operating ability. The highlights of these tests were the successful trial runs across the Simplon Pass in the Swiss Alps in January 2002. The fuel cell system consists of an array of six stacks with 125 cells each and an active area of 200 cm2. The stacks are electrically connected as two parallel strings of three stacks each in series in order to match the voltage requirement of the powertrain.

This is the second part of a study on using port water injection to quantifiably enhance the knock performance of fuels. In the United States, the metric used to quantify the anti-knock performance of fuels is Anti Knock Index (AKI), which is the average of Research Octane Number (RON) and Motor Octane Number (MON). Fuels with higher AKI are expected to have better knock mitigating properties, enabling the engine to run closer to Maximum Brake Torque (MBT) spark timing in the knock limited region. The work done in part I of the study related increased knock tolerance due to water injection to increased fuel AKI, thus establishing an ‘effective AKI’ due to water injection. This paper builds upon the work done in part I of the study by repeating a part of the test matrix with Primary Reference Fuels (PRFs), with iso-octane (PRF100) as the reference fuel and lower PRFs used to match its performance with the help of port water injection.