Investigation of Low-Frequency Data Significance in Electric Vehicle Drivetrain Durability Development

The digitalization of the automotive industry presents significant potential for technical advantages, such as the online collection of customer driving data. These data can be used for customer-oriented development to improve the durability of components or systems. However, due to current limitations in data transfer, the sampling frequency is typically lower than that of classic dataloggers. This paper examines the importance of low-frequency data in the development of drivetrain durability and investigates the extent to which these data can be utilized for a drivetrain durability analysis. Real driving data were utilized as a database to demonstrate the impact of downsampling on data significance, with the deviation in damage serving as the criteria. The findings suggest that low-frequency data, when available in sufficient quantities, can provide valuable information for predicting durability in rollover and time at level classification. The deviation in the damage prediction is less than 2% for distances exceeding 5000 km. However, low-frequency data are not suitable for rainflow analysis. Finally, the database size was adjusted to assess the statistical stability of the durability prediction. A larger dataset typically reduces variance. The paper presents evidence for the quality and usability of cloud data in drivetrain durability design. Cloud data from a significant number of customer vehicles can be used for certain analyses of representative customer load collectives, which can reduce development time and costs.