Present and Future Role of Battery Electrical Vehicles in Private and Public Urban Transport

Abstract

The OECD estimates that more than 70% of the developed world population lives in urban environments2, which explains a larger concentration of vehicles there. In the EU-27, there were about 230 million passenger vehicles in 2007 and the new vehicle sales were nearly 16 million vehicles in that year. Notwithstanding the improvements in regulated air pollutants from road transport, the urban population remains at higher risk levels by directly suffering the impact of conventional vehicles because of their closeness to the pollutant source. On one hand urbanization means that people when travelling in their urban environment will typically travel less than 100 km a day. And on the other, that a large percentage of all transâ port and delivery of goods will take place in urban areas. Acceleration and deceleration freâ quency, traffic jams, thus energy efficiency and pollution per km are worst within urban traffic. Many business cases exist for urban electrified road transport because these offer a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than conventional means already today. The above