Understanding operational and charging patterns of Electric Vehicle taxis using GPS records

The major obstacle to the wide acceptance of Electric Vehicles (EV) is the lack of a wide spread charging infrastructure. To solve this, the Chinese government has promoted EVs in public transportation. The operational patterns of EV taxis should be different from Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles (ICEV) taxis: EVs can only travel a limited distance due to the limited capacity of the batteries and an EV taxi may re-charge several times throughout a day. Understanding the status (e.g., operational patterns, driver income and charging behaviours) of EV taxis can provide invaluable information to policy makers. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper to understand EV taxis behavior patterns. We use real taxi GPS records data from a fleet with about 600 EV taxis operating in Shenzhen, China. We study the patterns from two aspects: operational behaviors and charging behaviors. The most important finding is: based on the net profits of both EV and ICEV taxis, which are derived from data, we find that commercial operation of an EV taxi fleet can be profitable in metropolitan area, when specific policies give advantages to EV taxis.