Decarbonising Passenger Cars

In contrast to other economic sectors, CO2 emissions in the transport sector are hardly decreasing. Especially motorised individual traffic is responsible for that. Therefore, in the past years, policy makers of the EU and in the EU Member States implemented measures that are supossed to reduce the fuel consumption of passenger cars and consequently reduce CO2 emissions. The needed profound transformation, however, is barley in sight, says Dr. Frederic Rudolph, Project Co-ordinator of the Division Energy, Transport and Climate Policy (Wuppertal Institute): "The European car industry appears to be stuck in a technological dead lock and the demand of alternative drives – like for example electric vehicles – still is on a very low level. Given those facts, it seems quite unrealistic to achieve the EU-climate goals." On top of that, the dieselgate shows that there is a rising discrepancy of carbon emissions values as claimed by car manufacturers and the actual wastage.

The recently published Wuppertal Paper 193 "Policy Options for a Decarbonisation of Passenger Cars in the EU" deals with that issue. The authors Matthias Damert (University of Graz und guest researcher at the Wuppertal Institute) and Dr. Frederic Rudolph analyse various policy instruments that motivate car manufactures to invest in the research and development of climate-friendly vehicles, on the one hand, and raise the demand for them, on the other hand. The authors base their observations on profound and contemporary literary studies and propose three types of policies: Market-based policies, that regulate fuel taxes, command-and-control policies, that include emissions standards, privileges for zero/low emission vehicles and sales quotas, and complementary policies, such as energy-efficiency labels.
The authors do not only remark on the effectiveness of various courses of action, they also consider the cost-efficiency and feasibility of such methods. The work points at weaknesses of current measures and derives recommendations for actors in the European Union, on national and municipal levels.

The Wuppertal Paper 193 "Policy Options for a Decarbonisation of Passenger Cars in the EU" is available under the following link.