Institute of Transportation, MOTC

     With the growth of population and economy development, people’s living standards rose thus making the use of vehicles become more and more common. Vehicles became one of the main source to cause greenhouse gas in developed countries, therefore, it’s important to reduce the emission of greenhouse gas. Furthermore, the lack of global oil resource made oil price rise continuously, so it’s never too late to find a more efficient way for energy use. Besides public transportation, conservation of oil of privately-owned vehicles and energy-saving are also crucial. This research analyzed the fuel consumption and CO emission of light duty vehicles. The study result could be the reference for vehicles’ fuel consumption and CO emission management in the future.
       In order to find key factors of the relationship between vehicle-behavior and fuel consumption or CO emission, this study used Industrial Technology Research Institute’s data of Hsinchu area from 2015. Using functional Principal Component Analysis and Regression Analysis, and also compared with traditional method to analyze. We eliminated the noise from external factors, and simplified the calculating process and time after functionalizing the data. The result shows that fuel consumption and CO emission have the similar tendency in functional PCA pattern, and it’s easier to express and explain the variation in parts. Due to insufficient samples, functional linear model’s goodness of fit is lower than traditional model, but on the other hand, it’s easier to compare calibration results of different roads’ features. Engine-speed and throttle have significant effect on fuel consumption. Especially at those transfer routes from low-speed to high-speed sections, and interchange sections. Changing the driving behavior because of road conversion is the main cause of intense rise of fuel consumption. CO emission has similar performance with fuel consumption in explanatory variables, however, the impact is less significant. Future study could use sufficient samples to fit with appropriate basis number to discuss.