The characterisation of some types of “advanced technology vehicles” may help to understand policies that are strongly either explicitly or implicitly technology-dependent. Recent models attempt to characterise such technologies in terms of fuel economy, price, and a range of performance and utility characteristics, examples of which include acceleration, power, and luggage space. However, information to make robust quantitative forecasts appears generally limited. Therefore, a simpler generalised form is proposed, in order to accommodate price and fuel economy functions that evolve with available information. Such an approach would assume that other advanced vehicle characteristics are similar to those of conventional vehicles, or that they can be exogenously translated into equivalent changes in price. A simple model of fuel economy and price increases is used to illustrate this concept, and recent projections regarding the status of and outlook for hybrid electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles provide ranges of plausible values for the relevant constants. Although information is more limited for other advanced transportation equipment, projections for buses, marine vessels, and aircraft suggest that a common general approach can be applied widely to the transportation sector. In any event, study of methods for characterising purchaser preferences would be an important complement to this study of vehicle characterisation. (Author/publisher)
Abstract