Vehicle Design

Multi-Moby project, funded under H2020 n° 101006953, aims at developing technology for safe, efficient and affordable urban electric vehicles. The objective of the paper is to show the results achieved in relation to structural integrity and occupant protection in the first year of the project. In a first stage simulation tools have been used to optimise the vehicle structure crashworthiness at different crash configuration based on smart use of High Strength Steels focused to simplified and affordable manufacturing processes. Once the structural behaviour met requirements and expectations, the restraint system has been developed. After design optimisation, three vehicles have been prototyped to perform three crash tests, two of them frontal, corresponding to Regulation 137 and Regulation 94, and one lateral, corresponding to Regulation 95.

Multi-Moby is an ambitious project aiming at quickly finalising the results of a cluster of ongoing and past European projects, addressing the development of technologies for safe, efficient and affordable urban electric vehicles (EVs). This paper presents the developments that have been implemented in the first half of Multi-Moby, which deals with low-cost M1 and N1 EVs, to be manufactured via low-investment and lean processes and plants. The Multi-Moby EVs have excellent passive safety characteristics, enhanced by pre-emptive active safety controllers. The vehicles can be coupled with efficient 100 V or 48 V powertrains. Fast charging is enabled by the integrated design of hybrid supercapacitor-battery cells and wall box chargers. The project will also consider low-cost automated driving solutions, with focus on gimbal-based camera systems for environmental sensing and detection.