The 2011 EU White Paper on Transport sets ambitious goals for phasing out conventionally fuelled cars in cities. Take-up and expansion of electric vehicles (evehicles, or electromobility) are one way to achieve this, as proposed by, e.g., the European Green Cars Initiative, the EU Action Plan on Urban Mobility, and the European alternative fuels strategy. The EU regulation 449/2009 specifies the average CO2-emission of new vehicles to go below 130 g/km in 2015 and 95 g/km before 2021. Vehicles emitting less than 50 g/km will count as more than one vehicle, called supercredits. The EU is currently considering to tighten the limit after 2021. Although several countries have set sales and stock targets for electrification as part of their climate policy, the number of such vehicles in use is very limited in most countries. A report from the Electric Vehicles Initiative (2013) shows that their 15 member states have an electric vehicle stock of 0.02 percent while the target is 2 percent. This discrepancy is part of the background for ERA-net’s Electromobility+ programme, which funds 20 European projects on this topic. COMPETT, “Competitive Electric Town Transport”, is one of these projects. A key reference for this report is Figenbaum et al. (2015, forthcoming). In this report, the term electric vehicle (EV) comprises battery electric vehicles (BEV) that are only powered by electricity, extended range electric vehicles (EREV), hybrid electrical vehicles (HEV), and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV). The most widely used alternative is the ordinary internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, which usually runs on conventional fuels like petrol and diesel. The recent years have seen substantial developments in the EV markets globally. The price of EVs has gone significantly down in real prices. Figure 1.1 illustrates how net prices have fallen steadily during the period 2009-14 for two typical BEV classes, mini vehicles as represented by the Think City/Mitsubishi i-Miev, which are of relatively equivalent category, and the compact Nissan Leaf. This development in price reflects a real development in prices of relevance, since BEVs have been exempted from Norwegian VAT and registration tax throughout this period. At the same time, the new models are better equipped and enjoy better warranties and dealer coverage. Further, a large variation of vehicles is now available. Back in 2009, there was only one real battery passenger car alternative in the Norwegian market, the “Think”. The Tesla Roadster was also available but only a few were sold. The introduction of a new technology and departure from ICEs could require large subsidies and investments as well as a political commitment (Ramjerdi and Fearnley, 2014), a situation more generally found for environmental technology (Jacobsen and Bergek, 2011; van den Bergh et al., 2011). This report is concerned with incentives for the take-up and use of passenger evehicles (registration class M1) that are in place in different European countries and to what extent they affect market shares of vehicle sales and vehicle fleets. A focus is placed on the user value of individual incentives, their effect on BEV sales, their impact on public budgets and their cost effectiveness (defined in chapter 4.4 as number of BEVs generated per unit of public spending). It is outside of this report’s scope to consider the consequences on the total level of traffic, nor to present a full economic welfare assessment of EV policies. Norway currently stands out as the world’s largest e-vehicle market as measured per capita. Therefore, Norwegian policies and their impact are of particular interest for this report. The analysis includes socio-economic factors as well as convenience and time savings due to e-vehicle policies. On the government side, the fiscal effects of evehicle incentives are significant. The cost of lifting a new technology into the market is considerable. Therefore, this report also highlights the need for a strategy for a phase-out of EV policies once the market has taken off. In this report, we investigate policy options for increasing the share of BEVs. We concentrate particularly on the Norwegian situation as well as on Austria. This report brings in, and combines, analyses of two web surveys among e-vehicle owners and non-e-vehicle owners, respectively, and an analysis of socio-economic factors, including convenience and time savings due to e-vehicle incentives, and how they affect EV uptake. It also builds on work within the COMPETT project to further develop a dynamic car fleet and propulsion technology model called Serapis (Pfaffenbichler et al. 2009; Renner et al. 2010; Frey et al. 2011; Pfaffenbichler et al. 2012). Serapis produces time series data about the number of vehicles by propulsion technology as a result of policy interventions like EV incentives, and calculates environmental and economic indicators for the evaluation of these policies. This report is organised as follows. Chapter 2 gives an overview of European incentives and market shares. Chapter 3 introduces the Serapis model including its procedures for calibration and estimation. In chapter 4, we look at effectiveness and budget cost effectiveness of various EV incentives from a government budget point of view, which also acknowledges the need for governments to maintain fiscal revenues. Electromobility scenarios are developed and assessed in chapter 5. Chapter 6 addresses implementation of EV incentives and, importantly because of their high cost, the need for a strategy for phase-out of incentives before chapter 7 wraps up the report with summary, conclusions and policy recommendations. (Author/publisher)
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