Smart Cities, Smart Mobility by Lukas Neckermann

Author:Lukas Neckermann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Our Friends Electric

In October 2016, Germany’s legislative council, the Bundesrat, made a historic announcement. It passed a resolution (albeit non-binding) to only allow emission-free cars on the roads by 2030. Germany, the global home of automobile innovation, the birthplace of the internal combustion engine, was shaping up to be among the first to ban it. It also called for the European Commission in Brussels to consider implementing the same ruling across the entire European Union. The Bundesrat resolution, as reported in German magazine Spiegel, championed the “stimulation of emission-free mobility.”94

In our first book, The Mobility Revolution, we explained, “electric motors are more efficient and fit more comfortably with the needs of today’s (and tomorrow’s) mobility than the internal-combustion engines they will eventually replace. They accelerate faster, utilize energy better and require less space than traditional combustion engines.” Florian Lennert now summarises, “Where petrol and diesel cars are concerned, there is now finally a recognition that this product as it stands, as a technology platform, doesn’t have a future beyond potentially the next couple of decades.”

Annual sales of battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids will increase from about 2.3 million units in 2014 to 11.5 million by 2022, or 11 percent of the global market, according to IHS, a market-research firm. Another day, another wildly inaccurate estimate of the growth in the electric vehicle market. So far afield are the estimates, that by the end of 2016 the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts for 2017 had been amended upwards tenfold since its own 2014 report.95

We are certain that close to 100 percent of new vehicles sold in 2025 in the developed world will be electrified – either as hybrids or full battery-electric vehicles. We can clearly see that most traditional automobile, bus and truck manufacturers are shifting significant parts of their research and development budgets towards electric motors and batteries. Furthermore, every funded automobile start-up of any significance is wholly focused on electric vehicles.

“Close to 100 percent of new vehicles sold in 2025 in the developed world will be electrified – either as hybrids or full battery-electric vehicles.”

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in China, where in 2016 there were 25 Chinese companies making 51 models of electric cars. Over 500,000 EVs were sold in China in 2016 alone. By comparison it took GM seven years to sell 100,000 Chevy Volts. China is pushing its Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) policy: eight percent of new cars to be electric by 2018, and 12 percent by 2020. It plans to introduce 200,000 EV buses by 2020 as well.

One traditional manufacturer pushing hard in this market is Volvo. Adrian Felton, its City Mobility Manager, told a November 2016 Air Quality Conference in London that Volvo strategy is now moving towards “the full electrification of vehicles”, whereby the electrification is hardly limited to cars. It has prototype buses that use conductive opportunity charging, or ‘opt-charge’, – which allows a seven to 30 kilometre (four to 19 mile) range from a three to six-minute charge

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