The Paris Agreement and Zero-Emission Vehicles in Europe: Scenarios for the Road Towards a Decarbonised Passenger Car Fleet

Abstract

A model is presented for estimating the impact on climate change by the European passenger car fleet. Based on real-world CO2 emissions, none of the scenarios allows compliance with the assumed 10% reduction by 2020, relative to 2005. Given a robust policy to limit real-world emissions by 2030, zero-emission sales shares as low as 8% allows a CO2 reduction by 30% by 2030, relative to 2005. This nonetheless requires a quick phase-out of conventional powertrains by 2035 to keep track with the desired decarbonisation by 2050. Therefore, increasing the effort on both a European as a national/regional level to incentivise both the industry and consumers to shift towards zero-emission technology is one of the key challenges on the short-term.