EVI-Rental: Electric Vehicle Infrastructure – Rental Car Tool

EVI-Rental logo

NREL's Electric Vehicle Infrastructure – Rental Car (EVI-Rental) tool simulates various aspects of rental car operations, including vehicle dispatch, electric vehicle charging, customer wait time, and fleet volume.

EVI-Rental can:

  • Estimate charging demand
  • Assist with charging infrastructure design
  • Quantify how rental car fleets affect grid loads, customer wait times, and life-cycle costs.

Developed by NREL via the Athena ZEV project, EVI-Rental will be publicly available in 2025.

Approach and Capabilities

EVI-Rental takes rental car demand data as the main input and generates power demand estimates and charging infrastructure requirements for different scenarios characterized by the assumptions of operational details—such as the required vehicle state of charge upon pickup and return. It also evaluates the impact of several other operational considerations—such as fleet composition and site design choices (including the number and type of chargers) and charging schedules that prioritize slow charging. Additionally, it tracks rental car customer and fleet status to measure customer wait time, charger utilization, and life-cycle cost of rental car fleet operation.

EVI-Rental simulates electric rental car operations using rental car demand as a main input to determine power demand estimates and charging infrastructure requirements for various scenarios.

It incorporates:

  • A vehicle dispatcher that matches vehicles to customer requests based on request type and availability
  • A charging scheduler that anticipates charging needs and charger location to be used
  • The impact of other operational considerations, such as fleet composition
  • Rental car customer and fleet status to measure wait times and charger use
  • Life-cycle cost evaluation module that considers charging infrastructure investment and utility cost.
Infographic showing various inputs for EVI-Rental demand (arrival, departure), EVI-Rental fleet (size, composition, and charging profiles), user behavior (returned state of charge, maximum state of charge), charging infrastructure (number of chargers, types of chargers), weather (temperature, sunlight), and utility (arrival and departure). Those inputs factor into EVI-Vehicle dispatch (including factoring in wait time for vehicles, charging interruption, and dynamic fleet increase) and charging simulation (which includes charging schedules). Outputs from EVI-Rental include types of ports needed, charger utilization, customer wait time, load profiles, charging infrastructure cost, and utility cost.

EVI-Rental incorporates various aspects of rental car operations to simulate real-world rental scenarios at airports. Image by Taylor Henry, NREL

Evaluation Options

Load profile and infrastructure design outputs generated by EVI-Rental can be fed into NREL's EVI-EDGES: Electric Vehicle Infrastructure – Enabling Distributed Generation Energy Storage model to enable the evaluation of behind-the-meter storage and distributed photovoltaic generation systems as potential solutions to meet the additional electricity demand driven by electrification.

The Athena ZEV project scouts aspects of rental car electrification—such as charging infrastructure investment and fleet composition—within the context of all other connected vehicle activities (freight, parking, and airport electrification, for example) to develop the EVI-Rental modeling framework for evaluating various electrification scenarios.

Contact

To learn more about EVI-Rental, contact athena.mobility@nrel.gov.

Share