Standard drive cycle recreation from general driving behaviour

In many parts of the world car manufacturers are required by law to state the fuel economy
performance of their vehicles when undertaking one or more Standard Drive Cycles such as the
Urban and Extra Urban test cycle definitions required in Western Europe. Such Standard Drive Cycles have their roots in obscure vehicle testing undertaken decades ago in the USA, and no physical test track exists in Europe which enables the precise re-creation of these test characteristics. Furthermore, the fundamental validity of these test cycles as a means of gauging and comparing passenger car fuel economy is seldom considered. This paper documents the early stages of a research project which aims to segment the Standard Drive Cycle definitions into a series of operating characteristic windows which can then be searched for and automatically extracted from general driving behaviour of a car on the road, and thereafter concatenated to re-creating a real-world equivalent of the Standard Drive Cycle without the need for rolling road or laboratory testing.