For three years, Ford conducted a study in three cities to find out how vans with plug-in hybrid drives can help improve air quality. In Cologne, Valencia and London, the car manufacturer has transporters in its Transit and Tourneo series with a hybrid drive overall 400 . km in use by companies and municipal authorities on the move cleverly. It has been shown that the environmental benefits of plug-ins (PHEV) can be increased if geofencing and blockchain technologies are used with them, Ford announced.

In Ford’s experiment, the drive of the vans used automatically switched to purely electric mode depending on the local air quality, the automaker describes. Geofencing, a technology that triggers specific actions depending on location, is used for this. It is installed as standard in the Transit Custom Plug-in-Hybrid and activates the electric mode without driver intervention as soon as the vehicle enters an environmental zone with a sufficiently charged battery.

The effect can be increased, explains Ford, using blockchain technology. It serves as a tamper-proof and transparent logbook that creates permanent records with a time stamp. The drive system with which the vehicle is driving in an environmental zone that is electronically marked by geofencing is registered. Using this data stored on several computers, the emission-free kilometers traveled can be documented and, if necessary, shared with authorized parties such as city authorities and fleet operators.

Dynamic geofencing Dynamic geofencing was also examined in Cologne. Environmental zones are set up where the air is particularly polluted. Based on the data from the city of Cologne and its system from the weather and climate service provider Climacell, the test vehicles from Ford automatically switch to emission-free electric mode in these areas.

Of the total 218. 300 kilometers covered by the 20 test cars drove in Cologne and Valencia in a model test, they drove 105. 600 Kilometers purely electric, explains Ford. In the zones in Cologne marked by geofencing, this value should be 70 Percent increased.

Ford Transit Custom PHEV Standards (4 pictures) From the outside, almost nothing indicates the serial hybrid drive.

(Image: Clemens Gleich) The supposed or actual The benefits of plug-in hybrids for the environment have recently been discussed more intensely. In November, European traffic clubs, which are particularly committed to environmental protection, threw in the debate that PHEVs are a far greater burden on the climate than the car manufacturers claim. Overall, PHEV drivers are assumed to use the electric mode of their vehicles too little, to charge their batteries too seldom.

(anw)