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T3CO Cost and Tool Features

Cost Features

Capital Cost Components

  • MSRP Breakdown: Glider, Fuel Converter, Fuel Storage, Battery, Motor Controller and Power Electronics, Plugin
  • Purchase or Sales Tax
  • Purchasing Downpayment: For loan or lease purchasing method
  • Residual Cost: Salvage value at end of life of vehicle

Operating Cost Components

  • Fuel Expense: Total cost of fuel or energy consumed
  • Maintenance Cost
  • Purchasing Cost: Recurring payments for loan or lease purchasing method
  • Insurance Cost
  • Fueling Dwell Labor cost
  • All operating costs are discounted year over year to account for time value of money

EIA Fuel Price Projections

When a US zipcode is provided in the Config or Scenario region field, T3CO can fetch fuel price projections from the EIA Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) API. The system auto-discovers the latest AEO publication year and reference scenario, resolves the zipcode to a US Census division, and retrieves region-specific nominal prices for diesel, gasoline, electricity, and CNG. Hydrogen prices fall back to the static FuelPrices.csv. This feature requires a free EIA API key and is controlled by the eia_fuel_prices toggle in cost_toggles.json.

Opportunity Cost Components

  • Lost Payload Capacity Cost: Cost of fractionally additional advanced powertrain vehicles needed to carry the same payload as a conventional one (only for Class 8)
  • Fueling/Charging Dwell Time Opportunity Cost: Cost of unproductive dwell time while charging or fueling a vehicle
  • Maintenance & Repair Downtime Opportunity Cost: Cost of planned and unplanned vehicle downtime due to M&R
  • All opportunity costs are discounted year over year to account for time value of money

Total Cost of Ownership

  • Two methods of estimating discounted TCO: 'DIRECT' and 'EFFICIENCY'
  • Annualized total costs: And
  • Total cost per mile and levelized cost per mile

Tool Features

  • Ability to generate individual Ledger and TCO Per Year reports exported as CSV or JSON files
  • Ability to run multiple Vehicle-Scenario-Energy selections from input files and export results to CSV
  • Option to run FASTSim simulations for energy calculations
  • Option to provide exogenous MPGGE and vehicle range inputs instead of running a powertrain simulation
  • BatchMode to run a folder of drivecycles through FASTSim and generate multiple scenarios per selection
  • Multiprocessing/Parallelization to reduce runtime for large selections. Can be clubbed with BatchMode to run 1000s of drivecycles on a local machine
  • Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer - Analyze on-road charging technologies and its impact on cost
  • Optimization Toolbox with NSGA2, PatternSearch, NelderMead, and PSO algorithms for vehicle sizing and TCO minimization
  • Regionalized fuel prices via EIA AEO API with automatic zipcode-to-census-division resolution
  • Charts Module to visualize Ledgers and large sets of T3CO results

Features Roadmap

  • Labor Cost as an operating cost component
  • Grants incentives, registration, title, and recurring fees added as Capital and Operating Cost components
  • Battery replacement and battery degradation accounted for in Operating Costs and Energy calculations
  • Regionalized registration and labor cost inputs
  • Option to run RouteE for Energy calculations