GHG emissions and other environmental impacts of road transport. It is important for EU policy makers to get an overview of the possible impacts of the introduction of Electric Vehicles. Therefore DG CLIMA commissioned CE Delft, ICF and Ecologic to carry out a study on the potential impacts of large scale market penetration of EVs in the EU, with a focus on passenger cars and light commercial vehicles. This study includes an assessment of both the transport part (e.g., composition of vehicle fleet) and electricity production and the impacts on well-to-wheel GHG emissions, pollutant emissions, other environmental impacts, costs, etc. This report is the first deliverable of this project and provides an overview of current market developments, i.e., mostly EVs coming to the market by 2011-12, but also covering vehicles up to 2015 as well as genuine show cars.

We analysed 106 different passenger cars and a smaller number of non-passenger cars. The relatively limited data in the sample, together with the speculative nature of the topic and the fact that some of the vehicles are still announcements or prototypes of which some specifications might change in the coming year(s), results in a limited statistical robustness of the findings, calling for caution when drawing conclusions building on the analysis.

Presently there is no clear indication for a real shift in terms of vehicle mass or design. The fact that the forecasted electric cars are on average not significantly heavier than today’s European cars implies either that the heavy battery weight will be compensated with weight reduction in other elements or that there will be more small cars in the market than currently. No fundamental shift in the short term towards light weight composite materials as in aircraft design could be observed. This may not hold true in the long term as composite materials may become market-ready in the future.
Vehicle prices will be considerably higher for Full Electric Vehicles (FEVs) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) compared to today’s cars powered by Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs).
Judging from the available data, battery capacity correlates very directly with battery mass. Thus, more battery capacity implies a heavier and larger car. Ranges are therefore still very much limited and pure electric driving will be limited to short and medium range applications for the near-term future. In the long run, the ranges of FEVs might increase significantly and extend the cars’ typical fields of application beyond city-only use. Based on electric urban drive ranges, FEVs are primarily in the 100-200 km ranges, PHEVs in the ranges below 100 km. This is linked both to vehicle mass and battery performance.

In terms of maximum speed and acceleration, Electric Vehicles (EVs) will not differ significantly from today’s cars. However, it has to be noted that EVs can only run at top speed for a very short time due to overheating issues. Their performance will increase over time, which will also allow electric driving beyond urban and local traffic.
 

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