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In an electric vehicle, a maximum cruising range is adversely affected by electric power consumption of auxiliary electric components for heating and cooling. Therefore, it is important for the air-conditioning to consume energy as efficiently as possible. This study describes how a proposed Occupied-Zone(OZ) HVAC system has attained a significant increase in the cruising range of an electric vehicle by air-conditioning occupied seats only. The idea of OZ HVAC is to confine air-conditioning to occupied-zones only. The OZ HVAC has an option of selectively air-conditioning three zones corresponding to driver, passenger and rear seating positions, while a conventional HVAC system air-conditions a whole cabin regardless of occupancy in each zone, which results in more power consumption compared to the proposed idea.

The development of an automatic defogging system using an accurate windshield humidity sensor and the existing HVAC hardware is described herein. Improved cabin temperature control and forward visibility for the driver was achieved using a sophisticated automatic defogging strategy integrated into the Automatic Temperature Control microprocessor. Laboratory tests were conducted under various weather conditions and test modes using a climate wind tunnel and field tests were conducted in North America The automatic defogging system worked well in all cases