Alternative vehicle powertrain performance monitoring

Alternatively fuelled vehicle projects are playing an important role in demonstrating the viability of emerging automotive technologies. The Camden Accessible Sustainable Transport Integration project (ASTI) is currently being undertaken. The project has four main areas. The first was to design and construct six advanced (gas and electric) accessible minibuses, with the associated charging and refuelling infrastructures. Monitoring alternative transport projects is an important technique for assessing the success of emerging technologies. It is important to consider such projects in a wide socio-economic context, and a systems approach may be taken to do this. Human factors play a significant role in monitoring, not only in terms of the user´s acceptance of new technology, but also with a view to the associated industrial relations issues. The use of a commercially available fleet management on-board computer is a viable low cost information collecting method. This allows the efficiency and effectiveness of alternatively powered vehicles to be monitored although experience has shown that, there is still a place for carefully designed and accurately maintained paper records