Wormald
Wormald’s roadmap to an 80% reduction in automotive GHG by 2050. Source: Wormald 2011. Click to enlarge.

Addressing automotive environmental and energy
supply problems would be better done by working from the market end first, rather
than through technology push, according to a recent report by Dr John Wormald, Managing Partner of autoPOLIS, an automotive consultancy.

The report, “Hot, thirsty and crowded: are the New Vehicle Technologies the Answer?”, starts by stipulating that the automotive industry globally has been a “runaway success”, with the current parc of some 800 million units to
expand to some 2 billion by the year 2050. However, Wormald notes, “We
are now running into physical limits to the growth of motorized mobility
.”

The planet is getting
hotter and hotter, because of man-made emissions
of greenhouse gases, notably CO2. The
growing vehicle parc is the largest consumer of
crude oil, which is starting to run out. The highway
infrastructure is increasingly saturated, with
a decreasing appetite for building new roads.

There will ultimately have to be a new transportation
model. This will clearly have to be consistent
with the new energy infrastructures and
these cannot come about quickly. It will have to
be integrated into the new habitats and be consistent
with them, which is a long-term project.
It will be solution-based, by which I mean sets
of transport offerings, not just selling people
cars and letting them get on with it. It will be
systems-led. This sounds like another innocuous
platitude but the implications are profound,
in terms of who has access to, and control over,
the market. New technologies will be deployed,
and not just on board the vehicles. There will
very likely be a new set of leaders, different
from the vehicle manufacturers of today.

…serious negative externalities have moved in
on the industry. The supply risks inherent to
a non-diversified primary energy source—98%
of road vehicles are propelled by petroleum-based
fuels—are beginning to be felt again, as
they were during the Oil Shocks of 1973-4 and
1979. There are serious supply-side inelasticies
in the oil industry, which cause wild fluctuations
in the price of oil. We have a non-transparent
and volatile oil market, not helped by the
lack of scrutiny over the national oil companies
within OPEC. There are the obvious geopolitical
tensions. And, lastly, the fact is, the internal
combustion engine is not that good on tank-to-wheels
(TTW) efficiency in transients. Which is
why we need those increasingly complex transmissions
and ever more sophisticated driveline
controls.

—“Hot, thirsty and crowded”

While electrification is generating much excitement in the industry today, Wormald notes, the catch is that electricity is difficult
to store in any quantity; hydrogen fuel cells remain very costly and require a
new generation and distribution infrastructure; and carrier energy has to be generated
from primary energy sources. That latter point is where the problems lie, Wormald says.

…the Electrification Coalition
wants 75% of US vehicle miles traveled
per year to be electric by 2040. This would require
an extremely rapid build-up of the EV +
PHEV parc, to reach 75% by the same date.
To get there means that 90% of new vehicle
sales would have to be EV + PHEV by 2030.
This is plainly unrealistic. The real motivation
is geo-political, to eliminate US dependence on
imported oil, with no regard for the environmental
consequences. Blow the tops off all those
mountains in Appalachia, burn that coal!

—“Hot, thirsty and crowded”

“China may have to lead the way, given
the problems it faces
with the environment
and energy supply.”

Wormald suggests that the current enthusiasm for EVs is
a poor choice of time and circumstance. Although seriously disadvantaged in the short
term, EVs will likely come into their own “later on”. Short term advantages to EVs include zero
tailpipe emissions (which, however, are only being
transferred to the power station); silence; regenerative braking,
which is limited by battery charging rates; and
energy cost (with no one mentioning that electricity
is much less taxed than are motor fuels).

The short-term disadvantages are severe, Wormald says: cost (which leasing can disguise but not change, like
a sub-prime mortgage); complete uncertainty
about residuals (which makes leasing risky for its
providers); limited range; long recharging times;
and limited charging point networks.

Long-term,
it could all reverse: the match to decarbonized
and intelligent electricity supply is potentially very
beneficial; petroleum-based fuels will become
scarce and expensive at some point in time; EVs
could form the basis for quite new transportation
systems. The uncertainties perhaps have less to
do with technology than with the availability, cost
and timing of alternative primary energy sources.
The fossil and renewable energies cost curves
will cross, but at lower volumes and higher prices
than people like to think, and not all that soon.

—“Hot, thirsty and crowded”

Selecting the short-term disadvantage of limited range as an example, Wormald suggests that the range problem can be overcome, if consumers accept
specialization of vehicles by role.

We have become accustomed
to buying cars for their universality,
rather than being the best fit for
a specific use, which becomes possible
with multiple car ownership. The key
is to get people to use smaller cars for
commuting and shopping trips, rather
than buying the largest they can afford.

—“Hot, thirsty and crowded”

Wormald suggests a three-stage market-focused roadmap to reach an 80% reduction in automotive GHG by 2050:

  1. 20% GHG reduction in 5–10 years. Stage 1 involves
    existing technologies but smaller, slower vehicles, some limited modal
    shifts and modest restrictions on driving.

  2. 50% GHG reduction in 10–20 years. Stage
    2 entails strong specialization
    of vehicles—individual, shared and public—which opens the door to EVs and
    matches decarbonization of electricity
    better, with new transportation packages
    and more planning and control of transport
    networks and infrastructure.

  3. 80% reduction 20-50 years out. Stage
    3 involves new habitats and
    mobility habits, and a decoupling of mobility
    from GDP growth.

Ultimately, in Stage 3, we have to control
the demand for mobility itself, through habitats
such as those, which already exists in
Freiburg-im-Breisgau in the Black Forest,
where housing is high-density and energy efficient.
It is close to the town center and
linked to it by efficient and convenient public
transport. It offers a far more neighborly
and civilized form of life than spread-out
suburbs, wholly dependent on motorization.
In crowded Asia, it is in fact the only realistic
option.

We cannot entirely dispense with individual
motorized mobility but we can maintain it
in a much more sustainable form, through new systems approaches.

—“Hot, thirsty and crowded”

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