An electric car uses electric power instead of an internal combustion engine powered by liquid or gaseous fuels like diesel fuel, gasoline, LPG or methane. It has been increasingly recognized that electric cars provide an opportunity to reduce global GHG emissions [3] and greatly increase air quality.
Even though the emissions by a vehicle determine only a part of total emissions related to mobility (apart from emissions during production of energy, production of a vehicle and its shipping and maintenance etc.), the transformation to net zero emission electric car fleet, combined with green electricity, could reduce CO2 emissions 10–12 times comparing to fossil-fuel vehicles [5]. Their widespread adoption also may help to decrease noise pollution in cities [6].
The adoption of electric car accelerates – the share of battery electric vehicles sales reached 5.4% in 2020 and 9,1% of new vehicles in 2021, while plug-in hybrid respectively 5,1% and 8,9%. A rapid growth is expected in major markets [2], although in some markets sales already reached high percentages (e.g. 80% of new sales in Norway or 30% in the Netherlands), proving that these vehicles are mature for most applications. However, a broader adoption of electric cars still faces several obstacles.
The main challenges for electric car adoption are high purchase costs in the lower vehicle segments, the still insufficient charging infrastructure in some parts of Europe and their charging time on longer trips.
The purchasing cost of an electric car shall not be confused with its Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) that includes the purchasing price, but also running costs, repairs, taxes, maintenance, depreciation and resale values. While purchasing cost can be still unaffordable for lower-income customers, also due to the increases in the prices of critical minerals which are crucial for battery (in particular cobalt and lithium [4]), the TCO can be already equal or lower than an internal combustion engine for customers driving high yearly mileage. The range of electric cars can cause ‘range anxiety’ in drivers mainly due to lack of awareness of recent improvements in performance (most current vehicles have running ranges from 300 to 500km) and deployment of recharging infrastructures (in fact, in some countries this problem is much less perceived than in other). Whoever has access to a private garage or parking place at home or at the workplace can easily cover 90% of the needs by installing a wallbox there, while public infrastructure is essential to allow other users to charge.
A parallel deployment of vehicles and their infrastructure is essential to accompany the growth of this market, but an increased popularity of electric cars can in principle also create an overload risk for existing electricity grid in the unlikely case that all vehicles charge at peak time, but work is already underway to support the balancing, demand-management and resilience of a ‘smart’ grid via Vehicle to Grid (V2G) features. Thus, electric car mass-market requires some investment in grid infrastructure to meet this increased demand (World Economic Forum, 2022).
Therefore, new solutions need to be developed such as:
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Reduce initial cost and improve convenience by improving battery energy density and reducing the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of batteries (cost already decreased by almost 90% in last decade, with a 7-fold increase in density) [1];
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smart and flexible charging in public parkings, i.e. schedule charging based on power constraints, price and priority, selling unused energy back to the grid;
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smart energy management, improving electric cars charging and stationary load management, reducing the risk of grid overload and using electric cars as grid energy storage;
Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/how-do-all-electric-cars-work
In order to speed up electric cars adoption, cities can implement different measures, including provision of free or preferential parking for electric cars, developing a wide range of publicly available chargers (mostly low power, but including also a small share of fast chargers), facilitating the installation of private charging points in residential and office buildings (right to charge) offering access to priority lanes for electric cars (e.g. limited to shared electric cars fleets), introducing zero-emission zones, electrifying the municipal vehicle fleets, simplifying administrative processes to build charging points, providing local subsidies for electric cars purchase or tax write-offs for companies or citizens willing to install charging points, facilitating zero emissions car-sharing schemes, multimodal integration with public means via park & ride or long distance travel.
MATURITY:
Zero emission electric cars are widely available on the market (nearly 100 models in most segments in 2022) and offered by the majority of car manufacturers. The large sales shares achieved in some markets confirm their technological maturity, and that of the deployed infrastructure, although some teething problems can remain. The specific technologies which can help electric mobility achieving mass market penetration in all EU markets are related to cost, charging technologies (e.g. low cost and high efficiency low power, ultra-high power and wireless charging). Most of these technologies are already at large demonstration phase and further investments are required to make them ready for commercial deployment on a wide scale [1]. Moreover, further developments are required in the area of batteries to optimise the trade-offs between cost, range, durability and ultra-fast charging capability via new chemistries) and higher efficiency in order to increase autonomy of electric vehicles and increase their capability to cover long distances with no or little time penalty in comparison with today’s cars.
While today’s numbers don’t pose significant problems to the grid even in countries with high sales, technology to manage charging needs to be validated and deployed proactively.
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